In the Shadow of Dark Wings
by BlackIceWitch
Summary: AU story 2010. Dean Winchester thought he was doing the right thing when he left his brother alone, but he was wrong. Pestilence spreads a new virus over the world and Dean struggles to gather the few survivors in a place of safety, train them to fight and give him a chance to save Sam, and the world, from the Devil. No slash. No spoilers. Comments always appreciated.
1. Chapter 1 When the Lights Went Out

**In the Shadow of Dark Wings**

* * *

**AN:** _This story is the first in a trilogy following an alternative storyline from the beginning of Season 5. Zachariah didn't show Dean "The End" and he and Sam stayed apart, with consequences he regretted. Many of the events of the episodes in the season still played out, but in different ways._

* * *

**Chapter 1 When The Lights Went Out**

_**May 8, 2010. Fort Wayne, Indiana**_

"Gotta delivery here for Dr Michaela Phillips? Vaccine for the influenza outbreak?" The delivery man tapped the counter of the hospital's reception area impatiently.

"Yes, one moment," the receptionist said, picking up the phone beside. "Dr Phillips? The vaccine has arrived, could you come down, please?"

She put down the phone and smiled at the man. "She'll be right down."

"No problemo," he said, turning to lean against the counter as he gazed around the full waiting room. "From this point, we got all the time in the world," he murmured, his eyes becoming black.

* * *

_**May 24, 2010. London, Great Britain**_

"You 'ear this bleeding rubbish?"

The woman peeling vegetables turned around at her husband's outburst, her gaze flicking to the old-fashioned telly in the corner of the flat's small living room.

"_Good evening. The unknown virus that is spreading faster than authorities can contain it has now been reported in Paris, Milan, Berlin, Moscow and St Petersburg, Barcelona, Madrid, Casablanca, Istanbul and Tel Aviv. Further reports have confirmed the virus in Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo and Kyoto, New Delhi, Santiago, Panama, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and Cairo_."

The baby started to wail and the man picked him up from the blanket on the floor, holding him in the crook of his arm.

"Nah then, none of that," he said, his voice low and gravelly as he looked back at the news anchor. "Got a world-wide disaster we have here, matey."

"_Nationally, we have reports just in of infections in Birmingham, Edinburgh and Dublin. Cornwall has been quarantined as has Lincolnshire and the border counties. There are as yet unconfirmed instances being reported in Exeter, Kent, Wiltshire and Wales_."

"Mum's in Wiltshire," the woman said worriedly, her hand smoothing over the pronounced curve of her belly as she glanced at the man. "I'll give her a ring after tea."

"_The Queen has closed Parliament and the government have declared martial law to protect the citizenry. The police have advised that a curfew has been enforced and request that all citizens stay in your homes_."

"Curfew," he said disparagingly to the child in his arm. "Like that'll bloody well help."

He turned the telly off and stood, walking around the cheap table that divided the small kitchen from the rest of the flat. "What's for tea then, luv?"

* * *

_**May 30, 2010. Kansas City, Missouri.**_

Dean swore as the next pile up appeared in front of him. He'd just gotten done moving two cars out of the way. At this rate it was going to take days to get out of the fucking city.

Beside him, Castiel watched the streets for more of the virus victims, the shotgun uncomfortable in his hand. He'd found Dean more by luck than anything else, the hunter still hidden from angelic view by the warding sigils engraved on his ribs, and his schedule erratic, to say the least, over the past week.

He looked through the windshield at the cars and trucks blocking the next intersection.

"I think you could probably get through on this side without moving anything, if you don't mind losing a little paint," he pointed out.

Dean's face screwed up in annoyance. Losing a little paint, like it was some minor consideration for fuck's sake. He eased the car over the kerb and looked at the gap. And naturally, the angel was right. He thought he could squeeze through the gap. The post box on the kerbside would give way, and he'd have some deep scratches up the side of the car. But better than sitting in this ever-growing graveyard and waiting to die.

He moved the car forward, face twisting into a grimace as the shriek of metal on metal filled his ears, his jaw muscle jumping and knuckles showing white through the skin, then they were through and there was a clear stretch of road.

"Where are we going?" Cas turned to look at him.

Dean rubbed his hand over his mouth and chin. "Bobby's."

"We should probably take the smallest roads, they're not likely to have so many obstructions."

"You think?" Dean asked sarcastically, turning away from the highway and digging through his memories for all the possible ways out of the city.

He didn't know what to do or where to go. He didn't know where his brother was, although given the current situation, he could field a pretty good guess at what Sam was doing. Or rather what Lucifer was doing with his brother's body. Shunting that thought aside, he concentrated on doing what he could do. Which was to go and get Bobby and see if the old man had any good ideas on what to do about the end of the world.

* * *

_**June 12, 2010. Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Alexandra Tennyson tightened the last bolt on the big drive belt of the generator and set down the socket wrench, wiping her hands absently on the legs of her jeans. The genset had been a bargain, and now she knew why … it had taken her three weeks to get the parts it had needed to run properly, and three days to get them installed. She looked over at the big diesel tank beside the shed and got to her feet, walking to it and turning on the fuel valve. There was plenty of fuel for the machine, she thought as she walked back to the genset, enough for more than a couple of months in the gravity-fed tank. Bleeding the lines carefully to release any air bubbles that might have been present, she cranked it over. The motor stuttered for a few moments, and she closed her eyes, sending a plea to whatever gods were in charge of machinery that she'd fixed everything properly. The engine roared into life and settled down to a steady, deep chug and she smiled, opening her eyes and looking down at it with a gleeful satisfaction.

Might not have all the mod-cons here, she thought, picking up her tools and turning away to walk back to the workshop, but at least she'd have lights and enough power to run the fridges and freezers.

She looked around the dilapidated camp, pushing down her feelings of misgiving. The place had been really cheap, essential since the inheritance from her aunt had been small, but it had so much potential. The main building stood in a small clearing, between the mixed woods that covered the property from the road to the lake and past it down to the shores of Lake Huron, a sprawling two-storey timber and stone house with twelve bedrooms, four bathrooms, a commercial-sized kitchen, three living areas, dining room, offices and store rooms. The foundations went down to the bedrock and under the house a maze of root cellars and basement rooms took up almost the same square footage as the house above.

To either side of the building were the cabins, a dozen in total. Simple, two room buildings, strongly constructed of local logs and built on foundations of local stone, they'd been built eighty years ago as additional accommodation to what had then been a fashionable hunting lodge. Over the years, the property had been turned into a children's summer camp, a commune for a group of hippies in the '60's and '70's, had remained empty for a while before a local community organisation had bought it to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents. That project had apparently run out of funding, a little over ten years ago, and Camp Chitaqua had gone back on the market, unsaleable in a depressed economy, left to itself until she'd found it.

It needed a lot of work, she knew. But she had no expenses to speak of other than fuel for the generator and food for herself, and as much time as she needed, and she had a plan to bring the place back to its former glory as a summer camp for disadvantaged children, a chance to camp in the woods, fish and swim and canoe in the lakes, learn something different in lives that were perpetually bound to the tenement housing and violence of the streets in the cities of Chicago and Detroit.

_Yeah, well don't get too far ahead of yourself_, she told herself dryly. _Still got a load of work to do before you get to that point_. She closed the workshop doors behind her and walked up to the house, climbing the flight of steps to the broad wrap-around porch and going inside.

It'd taken her four weeks of solid cleaning to get the main house liveable, but looking around it now, she felt her heart lift with the difference. The main living area, to the right of the front hall, was clean and bright, the warm timber floors gleaming with polish, rugs scattered over them, a collection of second-hand club sofas and armchairs arranged loosely around the huge open hearth in the centre of the northern exterior wall. Clean windows let in the sunshine and reflected from the freshly painted white ceilings, and half of the built-in bookshelves that lined two of the walls were filled with her books, giving the room a homey, lived-in look.

She turned away from the room and walked down the short hall to the kitchen, another room that was finally clean and unpacked. It was daunting to someone who'd spent most of her life living in small apartment or houses, holding two long cast-iron wood ranges as well as a commercial gas stove with six burners and two big ovens. Walking to the double stainless steel sinks, she turned on the tap and lathered her hands with the industrial de-greasing soap that sat on the windowsill, washing the grease and oil from her hands and looking out over the uninterrupted view down the slope to the shore of Lake Solitude. Even if it took her another year to get the cabins and the grounds cleaned up and ready, she thought, she wouldn't mind. Living here was worth it, the peace and tranquillity of the woods and lake reminding her of her own childhood, of fishing and exploring the lakeshores with her father.

And she needed some peace and tranquillity after everything that had happened in the last year, she thought. Needed a time of quiet and rest to get her head back together, give herself time to heal.

Turning off the tap, she dried her hands, heading out of the kitchen and back to the hall, climbing the broad staircase to the upper level.

A shower, clean clothes and an evening of reading would round out the day perfectly, she decided, turning into the bedroom she'd chosen and slowing as she caught a glimpse of herself in the full-length free-standing mirror next to the window. She stopped in front of the mirror and looked at her reflection critically.

Five foot five inches in her bare feet, still pudgy from the seven months she'd spent in the hospital, her face rounded and pale. Her hair was slowly growing out. It'd been all shaved off, but it reached her jaw now, a soft tangle of maple-coloured curls that wouldn't take a style no matter what she'd tried. She pushed a hand through it, watching it settle back into the same tangle and sighed.

Her eyes still looked a little sad, she thought. The irises were a soft grey-green in colour, flecked with blue and hazel close to the pupil and rimmed with a darker grey around the edges. Her brows and lashes had grown back, which was a huge relief. She hadn't been able to look at herself for months, not recognising the face in the mirror without them. They were a few shades darker than her hair and the lashes were thick again, casting a shadow against her cheeks.

Turning away from the mirror with an impatient exhale, she walked into the bathroom. Nothing to write home about, she thought dryly, but then it didn't matter here anyway, since there was no one around to see her.

* * *

_**June 30, 2010. Cicero, Indiana**_

Rufus was out of the pale blue Chevy Nova as soon as it stopped at the kerb, the shotgun in his hands and his gaze scanning the quiet street. In the driver's seat, Chuck looked around nervously. Dean got out of the Impala, leaving the door open as he crossed the sidewalk and ran up the short flight of steps to the front door, rapping hard against it with the stock of the pump action he was carrying.

"Come on, be here," he muttered, peering through the dirty glass at what he could see of the interior. "Be here."

He took a step back as he saw the shadow move inside, heard the lock being undone. Lisa opened the door a crack, staring at him through the gap, a livid bruise on one cheek and tears filling her eyes.

Lowering the gun barrel, he stepped toward her, pushing the door wider as his arm curled around her shoulders and pulled her close.

"What's happening?" she whispered against his shirt and he shook his head. "There've been these … people … they're attacking everyone."

"Where's Ben?" He looked over her head into the house, relief filling him as he saw the boy's head emerge from behind the door to the dining room. "Come on, we've got to get out here, now."

Lisa pulled back from him. "Wait, we need our –"

"Whatever you need, we'll get on the way," he cut her off abruptly, gesturing to Ben. "This place isn't safe. We have to get out of here."

"What –?"

"Later, Lise, get in the car," he pushed her out, toward the street, and grabbed Ben's arm, dragging him out of the house and down the steps. "I'll explain it later, okay? Just – we have to go, now!"

They got into the back seat, Bobby turning to nod at them from the front. Rufus gave the street a final look before he slid into the passenger seat of the Nova, Chuck following as closely as possible as Dean pulled out ahead of him. Bobby leaned forward as he saw movement from an alley further up.

"Dean – croaties," he said. Dean nodded.

"I see 'em."

"Look out!" Lisa cried as a group of people spread out across the street in front of the black car.

"Close your eyes, Ben," Dean said tightly, putting his foot down. The car surged ahead, the engine roaring. It hit the people in the centre of the group, leaving after-images of grey skin, matted and filthy hair, red-rimmed eyes and the rust-coloured stains of old blood with the passengers as the car bumped and lurched over the bodies.

"Oh!"

"They were infected," Bobby said shortly. "Not human any more."

"But –"

The old hunter turned in the front seat, looking at Lisa and Ben, his face drawn and his eyes narrowed. "They weren't people, not any more. The virus has spread across the country, and probably the world by now. If we're going to make it, then it's us or them," he ground out, his gaze boring into hers, then flicking to the boy's. "You want to see your boy infected? Or eaten?"

Lisa cowered back in the seat, her arms wrapping around Ben as she met Dean's gaze in the mirror. He shrugged, his eyes cutting back to the road.

"It's true, Lise. We got here as soon as we could, but we can't stay here. We have to find someplace safe, not populated so heavily. Someplace we can defend."

He shot a sideways look at Bobby. "We had any word from Boze or Emmett?"

The old man shook his head. "Nothing."

Turning around in the seat to look at the woman and her son sitting beside him, Bobby asked, "It's Lisa, isn't it?"

She nodded.

"I'm Bobby Singer. In the car behind, we got Rufus and Chuck and Cas," he said, gesturing to the Nova following them. "I know this seems like a crappy situation, but you're going to have to trust us on this one. The cities, they're too dangerous to stay in now, too many places to hide … hell, too many bodies that are cooking up their own diseases. The power's gone, the sanitation systems have shut down, there's no food left," he said bluntly, raising a brow at her. "I'm guessing you know all that stuff already."

She nodded again, her eyes darting to the mirror.

"Everything that was," Bobby said, gesturing at the devastation they were driving through. "That's gone. You gotta get your head around that. No one's gonna come clean it all up."

"But the government –" she started to say and Bobby shook his head.

"Government, or what's left, they're holed up in the places they could defend," he said sourly. "Places where they got stocks of food and clean water. They won't be coming out to get us, to rescue us. We're it. We have to find somewhere defensible as well."

Lisa's mouth compressed as she stared at the rearview mirror, Dean's eyes reflected there. "Where's Sam?"

Dean's face expression became stony. "Sam's gone."

"I'm sorry," she said after a moment, her voice soft in the silence that filled the car.

* * *

_**July 1, 2010. North Webster, Indiana**_

"Do you know where we're going?" Lisa asked, leaning on the side of the car as Dean filled the tank, the siphon hose sucking fuel from the underground reservoir into the car.

"Bobby said there's an old hunting camp, somewhere north, upstate Michigan, that's probably still abandoned. We'll head there, fortify it, use it as a base."

"A base for what?" she asked.

"For getting rid of the zombies and dealing with Lucifer," he told her tersely, pulling out the hose as the fuel spilled over and holding it up.

"Can you – can you do that?"

"I hope so. I'm not planning on spending the rest of my life hiding in the woods, growing potatoes."

He coiled up the plastic hose, and dropped in the trunk, slamming the lid down. Looking over his shoulder at the store, he nodded slightly to himself as Rufus came out with Ben, both of them carrying bags of food and bottles of water.

"Get in, we're going," he said to Lisa, going around to the driver's side. She looked at her son and opened the rear door, sliding in next to Bobby and taking the bags from Ben as he got in after her.

Dean pulled out, driving slowly out of the small town. Behind them, Rufus was driving the Nova, Chuck and Cas watching for him.

A few vehicles lay along the road, overturned or nose-in the shopfronts. But with a small population, the damage here had been minimal. Trying to get out of Kansas City had taken him and the angel three days, the freeways choked with stopped vehicles, fires burning across much of the city, the stench of the bodies cooking in the early season heat filling the air so thickly he felt as if he'd never stop throwing up.

Going to Bobby's had been an exercise in finding the most backward roads he could. The interstates were graveyards and traps, even the federal and state highways had been bumper-to-bumper in many places, vehicles abandoned or containing their owners rotting bodies, people unable to think of escaping on their feet, so used to the mobility of their cars.

Now, he turned down a small gravelled road, increasing his speed as the houses thinned out, the lake sparkling in the morning sunshine to their right.

The woman who leapt out in front of the car ahead of him tested his reflexes severely. He saw her clearly only in the last twenty feet and yanked the wheel to one side, the car sliding out under its own weight and spinning in a half-circle as he hit the brakes.

"What the hell –" Bobby sputtered.

"Not infected," Dean said shortly, grabbing the carbine rifle from the seat beside him and opening his door.

"You alright?" he called to the woman as she got slowly to her feet from the side of the road. He could see the long line of gravel rash along her arm where she'd hit the shoulder when she flung herself out of the car's path.

"I didn't think you were going to stop," she said shakily, looking from the gun to his face. "No one has come through here in over a week."

He looked at her carefully. She was tall, maybe five eight or nine, but thin, her short blonde hair inexpertly hacked off, uneven and standing out around her face. Dark brown eyes looked too big for her features, the sockets shadowed as if she hadn't slept in a while.

"What happened here?"

She made a noise in her throat, lifting her hands helplessly. "You tell me! I woke up one morning and looked out the window and Toby, my mailman was … he was … eating … my neighbour, Mrs Ottoman, on the sidewalk. Just … there was blood everywhere and people walked by and no one even stopped." She shook her head, her hands balled into fists and her gaze dropping as she struggled to hold back the hysteria that was clearly close.

"I stayed in my house and a couple of days later, these … people … they came around and broke in. I hid in the attic for three days," she told him. Her eyes were bright, the memory too recent, he thought as she looked back up at him. "Do you know? Do you know what's happened?"

"There's a virus," Dean said, looking around. "Turns people into killers. Spreads fast." He glanced back over his shoulder at the Nova, parked behind the black car, jerking his head at Rufus and turning back to her as the older hunter got out and walked over.

"What's your name?" Dean asked the woman.

"Renee," she said, looking from him to Rufus. "Uh, Renee Taylor."

"Okay, Renee, I'm Dean," he said, glancing at Rufus as he stopped beside him. "This is Rufus. We're going somewhere else, somewhere we can stay safe, but we can't afford to take anyone with us unless we're sure they're not infected."

"Mommy?"

All three turned to look at the doorway of the house that Renee had come from. Two children stood there, a girl of perhaps five, and a little boy a couple of years younger. Both were quite clean, and looked as if they had food in the last few days. Perhaps that was the reason why their mother didn't, Dean considered briefly.

"Those yours?" he asked. Renee nodded nervously, her eyes on his gun.

"We're – there's nothing wrong with us," she said in a low voice. "We're just starving. There's no more food in the house, and I –" She looked back at the children. "I can't risk going out to look for more, in case those people come back, or something – something happens."

Rufus nodded understandingly. "Alright, ma'am, this is how we're going to do it. We've got a simple test here, it'll tell us if you're okay or not. You take it, and you and your kids can come with us. You don't want to take it and you'll have to stay here."

Renee looked at him. "What is it?"

He pulled out a half-gallon bottle of water and offered it to her. "Drink."

Dean watched her doubts and suspicions flick across her face. Behind him, he heard the car door open again, and his head snapped around to see Lisa get out of the car with Ben.

"Lise, back in the car."

"No, she's scared you're going to harm her," Lisa said, walking around the trunk, her arm around Ben's shoulders. "It's okay, they're good men. They won't hurt you or your children."

Renee stared at her, her gaze dropping to Ben for a long moment, then shifting back to Lisa's face. Stretching out her hand abruptly, she took the bottle from Rufus, opening the lid and tipping the water into her mouth. She swallowed nearly a quarter of the bottle in gulping mouthfuls then let it drop, screwing the lid back on and handing it back to the hunter.

"Did I pass?"

Dean's mouth quirked up on one side as he nodded. "Yeah, get your kids."

He turned to Rufus as she left. "Not going to fit in the Impala or the Nova with the extra supplies we'll need. We need another set of wheels."

"That'll do until we can somewhere with a dealership," Rufus said, looking at the SUV parked in the driveway of the house two doors up. "I'll take Renee and her children, still leaves Chuck and Cas together."

Dean nodded and walked over to Lisa as Rufus headed up the street. "That was a really stupid thing to do," he said to her.

"Two guys with guns standing in front of her telling her she has to drink something? Come on, of course she was scared. I would've been having second thoughts about going with you too."

"Maybe, but it still put you at risk," he said. "And Ben."

"She looked healthy, and her children look fine, she's obviously been giving them all the food she had," Lisa argued, turning to look up the road as the SUV rumbled into life.

Dean looked at her and drew in a breath, wondering if there was anything to be gained from pointing out to her that in the early stages, people could look and behave rationally.

"How did you think of using holy water to test people?" she asked, and he decided against raising it now. When they got somewhere they could be sleep for the night, he'd give the speech to all of them. Only Sam had been with him in Oregon.

"It's a demon virus," he said, turning to watch Rufus drive slowly toward them. "It leaves traces of sulphur in the blood. It seemed reasonable to assume that it would react to holy water."

"And it has?" She looked up at him.

He turned back to her, a fleeting expression of a memory passing over his face. "Oh yeah, it reacts pretty damned violently if the person's infected."

Lisa looked at the woman as she lifted her children into the back seat of the SUV. "I thought she was – you know – when she came onto the road like that."

He saw that she was thinking of what would have happened to the children if he'd run over Renee, as he had the croaties in Cicero.

"I'm getting to be pretty good at seeing the differences," he told her, gesturing for them to get in the Impala. "Even at a distance."

"Yeah, good thing," Lisa said, with a smile.

* * *

_**July 3, 2010. Hastings, Michigan**_

"Alright, we gotta get some supplies," Bobby said as they drove slowly into the town. Like all the others they'd gotten close to over the last month and a half, it seemed empty, deserted. Trash blew along the wide streets, and a long-dead power line lay curving across the road, the light glinting from the steel wire.

Dean nodded. They needed food and they would need more ammo as well. Food was getting harder to find, and he thought that they'd probably need to start hunting for meat, if they could find any areas that were wild enough.

They'd taken a day to orient Renee to the situation and give both women some idea of what firing a gun was like, choosing a field well away from nearest towns to show them how to use the 9mm autos, the shotguns and the semis. Renee had shown a natural talent, for understanding the trajectory, understanding the weapon's recoil. Lisa could hit something if it wasn't further than about thirty feet away. There wasn't time for any more but he thought that with Bobby, Chuck and Cas, they would be able to cover the vehicles while he and Rufus scavenged.

He saw the line of stores ahead and slowed down, glancing in the rear view mirror at the SUV crawling along behind him. In the centre of the main street, the supermarket was dark, the doors and windows gone. Dean looked at it for a moment, chewing on the corner of his lip. He stopped the car, pulling on the brake and leaving the engine running.

"You two stay in the car," he said to Bobby and Lisa. "Ben, get up here."

Ben slithered over the back of the front seat. "One beep for a warning," Dean said, gesturing to the horn.

"Dean, I ain't got a good feeling about this," Bobby said softly, looking up the street. "Seems a little too deserted."

Dean shrugged. "Not like we've got a lot of choice, Bobby. Make sure you cover me."

Bobby nodded as Dean got out, slinging the carbine over his shoulder by its strap, pulling the Colt .45 and thumbing off the safety as he saw Rufus getting out of the SUV. Renee had opened her window, and was sitting on the frame, an AR-15 held in both hands, supported by the roof. She was scanning the street continuously as the two men walked toward the store. Behind the larger vehicle, Chuck and Cas were waiting in the Nova.

"Gotta a bad feeling about this, Dean," Rufus muttered as they stepped through the broken glass of the doors.

"Yeah, that makes three of us," Dean said, his mouth curling down derisively. He peeled off right as Rufus headed for the aisles on the left.

The shelving was empty, for the most part. Some things, citronella oil and shoe polish and carpet deodorisers were still there, the non-edible reminders of a world well and truly gone now, but everything else had been thoroughly gleaned. Dean looked along the aisles irritably. Wherever it was they were heading, they were going to need to a hell of a lot more stuff than just canned and packaged goods anyway. They'd need seed and seedlings, greenhouses this far north, fishing gear and somewhere where they could get game. Or livestock, he considered, turning down the next aisle and looking at the torn packaging that littered the floor.

The sound was small, just a scrape along the floor, but he was turning instantly, the barrel of the carbine rising smoothly, his finger pressing the trigger and the harsh chatter of the gun filling the store's interior like a cannonade.

The two croaties who'd appeared at the head of his aisle were thrown to the ground by the impacts. More poured out through the reinforced steel door that led to the rear of the store, a lot more, and he backed up, hearing Rufus' pump action firing continuously several aisles over, the man's swearing audible in between blasts. The light flickered and he glanced back over his shoulder at the same time as he heard Renee's rifle let loose a volley of shots, and Bobby's shotgun blasting a counterpoint to the sharper cracks of the AK47 he'd left with Cas. There were more croaties running down the street, some heading for the vehicles, some crawling into the store through the broken windows.

_Fuck!_

"Rufus!" he yelled, turning and running toward the front of the store, spraying bullets in short bursts, from his hip, knocking the croaties out of the way as he saw them gathering around the two cars. "Move your ass!"

"Right here, boss," Rufus panted, spinning around and shooting the two behind them, pulling out his handgun as he shucked the slide.

The creatures were crawling over the cars, limiting their options for killing them. Dean saw Lisa crawl into the front seat, and start the Impala, the black car leaping forward as she put her foot on the gas, knocking several from the sides and front, more running up to the car as it stalled. Behind her, Renee had closed the windows and locked the doors of the SUV, sliding into the driver's seat and starting the engine. She reversed back over several croaties, shaking more loose from the bonnet and roof as she hit the brakes and surged forward.

"Get them off the SUV!" Dean shouted to Rufus, running for the black car. He could hear the engine cranking but had the feeling that Lisa had never driven a manual transmission in her life, leaving her foot on the brake while in first gear.

Reversing the rifle in his hands, he slammed the butt into the heads and backs of the people that had gathered around it again, pulling out his automatic and firing point blank into those that weren't pressed up against the glossy black body.

He skidded to a stop, swerving aside as Lisa got the engine going and the car proceeded in lurching leaps up the street, shooting every croatie that rolled off, hearing the SUV behind him, the engine revving as Renee reversed and drove forward, running over those in her path and Rufus' shotgun blasted anyone coming close. He couldn't see Chuck past the bigger car, but he could still hear the Kalashnikov.

"Clutch!" He shot another man in the face, barely registering the blood-and-dirt grimed face as the body fell and reached for the door handle. "Lise, the door!"

She unlocked the driver's door and slid aside. He was about to open the door when he felt hands in his clothes, dragging him backward, swinging his elbow back and feeling the mushy crack of bones breaking beneath it. The Impala was trundling along in first and getting away from him and he swore, kicking out at another croatie and accelerating to a sprint to catch up to his damned getaway vehicle.

Wrenching the door open, as he reached it, he threw himself sideways into the seat, tossing the guns onto the floor and slamming the door shut, his feet finding the clutch and accelerator. He changed up fast through the gears, ignoring the lurching bumps and bangs as the croaties ran into the front and sides, and let out a noisy exhale as they finally cleared the ambush, the road out of town clear and empty. A glance behind showed the SUV tight on his tail, Renee's face hard and set as she leaned over the wheel, a flash of pale blue behind her.

"Cut that a bit fine," Bobby remarked. He glanced in the mirror and shrugged.

"Yeah, just a bit."

* * *

_**Cadillac, Michigan. One day later.**_

They'd parked the cars four miles out of town, in a small barn that had sat off the county road, and walked in, him and Cas and Rufus. Cadillac had proved to be empty, completely and utterly empty. A look through the stores along the main street had told them why. Almost every one that had sold food or clothing had been ransacked and cleared out completely, nothing left even for the rats that were skittering around in the shadows. A fast door-to-door showed no one, not even dead bodies in the houses of the town either.

Was it possible for the whole town to have been turned, Dean wondered, looking at the bare cupboards and pantries in home after home. Could they have left in a group to hunt in other towns, where there were still victims? Still food?

He shunted the thought aside. He didn't even know if the croaties ate, although he suspected that before too much longer, if they did, they would have only one food source left to them. The thought turned his stomach and he pushed that aside as well.

The small town did have a feed store and miraculously, it was almost untouched. Driving in just before dark, they'd loaded seed, and corn and oats, guns and fishing gear and camping gear, plain woollen blankets, sleeping bags, oilstones and ammunition into the three cars until there was barely enough room for the passengers.

He wondered if they should stick around, for a while anyway, see if they could find a good place to hole up close by, then jettisoned the idea. The longer they put off finding a permanent base, the worse their situation would become. They needed somewhere safe to sleep, to plan. To breathe.

The cars were down on their axles when they left, headlights off as the full moon lit the gravelled back roads he'd chosen. Stopping forty-five miles further east, the small farmstead was empty, abandoned, the bodies of the man and woman who'd lived and died there easily wrapped in the bed linen and taken outside. In the morning, they would bury them, Dean thought. In the meantime, they'd sleep.

Lisa and Renee found kerosene lanterns and candles, and canned vegetables and fruit and a heavily salted side of bacon in the root cellar. The soup, cooked on a small propane camp stove, smelled aphrodisiacal after weeks of nothing fresh. They ate in the kitchen, the room lit by the warm glow of the lanterns.

* * *

"Why can't we stay here?" Lisa asked softly as she stood with Dean in the doorway of the children's bedroom, watching Ben and Alice and Cory settling down in the big bed together, her son turning to blow out the candle when all three were comfortable. "There's no one around here."

He shook his head, turning away. "It's too open, we can't defend it. We'd be trapped in the house if anything did come."

She backed out of the room, closing the door behind her and following him down the hall and stairs to the living room. A dozen candles and two lanterns provided good light in the small room, Rufus sitting at a table, reading by the light of one of the lanterns, Bobby on the sofa, making notes in a thick, leather-bound journal. Cas and Chuck sat on the other sofa, talking softly.

"Then what? Where is safe enough?"

"Probably nowhere's really safe, but there are places that are going to be better than others," he told her absently, looking through the cupboards. He sighed as he found a bottle of whiskey in one, unscrewing the lid and swallowing a mouthful from the neck.

"And then what? We just live in the backwoods until – when?" She leaned against the doorway, looking from Dean to the others, one brow lifted.

"Better than dying now, ain't it?" Bobby asked, taking the bottle that Dean passed him.

Dean turned back to her. "You two get some sleep. We'll take watches tonight. We'll keep going in the morning."

Lisa turned and saw Renee standing silently behind her, holding a thick candle in an old-fashioned candle-holder. She followed the other woman back up the stairs to the room they sharing next to the children's.

"What do you think?" she asked Renee as she closed the door behind her.

"About finding a safer place?" Renee put the candle on the nightstand between the two single beds, undressing next to the bed and drawing back the covers to sit on the edge as she pulled off her boots and socks. "I agree with them. We can't keep moving. And if we're in one place, we have a chance at least of growing some food, maybe finding some animals."

"You sound like you've thought about this," Lisa said, slipping into the other bed.

Renee smiled. "I have, since the moment I realised I was trapped in my house and watching monsters walking through my neighbourhood." She leaned back against the pillows. "The power's out and the government is either trapped somewhere themselves or gone for good. Whatever stores of canned and packaged food there were, those have probably gone now too. If we want to eat, if we want to survive, we're going to have to grow our own, or hunt it, or butcher it … this country isn't as good as, say Iowa, for farming and farms but it's not that bad, there must be some stock running around loose. We don't need much right now, and we might be able to get more if we look around without needing to protect our children at the same time."

"So you're talking about returning to the Stone Age?" Lisa looked over at her uneasily.

"Well, no, not that far back. But early agriculture, I guess, yeah." Renee shrugged. "Look at the moment, there's plenty of gas, in every underground tank in the country. And far fewer people competing for it. But sooner or later, that's going to run out, and we're not going to have tractors and bulldozers and cars and machinery to do things for us."

"That's – that's a long time frame you're looking at."

"Before the power went out, I was watching the news, Lisa." Renee pulled the covers over herself, her hands plucking restlessly at the bedspread. "The last thing I heard was that most of Europe and Asia had been infected. That's the bulk of the world's population, right there." She looked at the other woman. "I don't know if this is fixable, but everything we've ever known, I know that's gone now. Even if the croaties – the infected people – and the virus disappeared tomorrow, it would take years to get back to having the power on, to having people who know how to do that, even. TV, phones, the internet … they would be small networks for decades, even travel would be limited for years."

She wriggled down in the bed, exhaling. "Cory and Alice are alive. I'm alive. That's a miracle in itself. I'd be pretty happy to find a place that the guys thought was safe enough and just be for awhile."

"Yeah," Lisa said, rolling over and blowing out the candle on the nightstand. "I guess."

* * *

"How much further do you think this place is?" Dean sat down on the other side of the table from Rufus, and looked at Bobby.

"A couple of hours from here, pretty much due east," Bobby said, holding up a map. "The nearest town is Tawas, not very big, mostly shipping on the lake. We can do a recce there and see what's around, then go look for the camp."

"We got a couple of months to get ourselves organised, before the cold weather sets in," Rufus added, looking up at Dean. "I think a lot of the croaties are going to be dead after winter."

"Yeah, well, we can only hope," Dean said, leaning back in the chair and closing his eyes.

* * *

_**July 4, 2010. Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean lay on the ground, looking down through the bracken and spindly undergrowth at the buildings that were spread out beneath him. He could hear the hum of the genset, even at this distance, the silence in the woods almost complete. No traffic on the highways, no rumble of planes overhead, or the noises of shipping, carried clearly over the water of the lake.

Someone was down there. He lifted the glasses to his eyes and scanned the compound slowly. The main building was in good order, windows unbroken, clean, the porch cleared of leaves, raked piles here and there on the ground outside the house. Perhaps half of the cabins also looked like they'd been cleaned up, in contrast to the rest which were unkempt with leaves piled into the corners of the small porches, cobwebs clumped in between the roof and the columns supporting it. He caught a movement at the edge of his vision and moved the glasses over.

The woman came around the corner of the main building, pushing a wheelbarrow that was loaded with split logs. He watched her stop in front of the porch steps, filling her arms with the firewood and carrying it up to stack it neatly along the wall. She turned back and picked up another arm load.

Not abandoned, then, he thought tiredly. And she wasn't infected, her movements methodical and economic. He adjusted the field a little and saw that she had clear, pale skin, was healthy-looking, clean hair, well-covered for someone who'd been living in the post-Apocalypse world for over two months now.

Lowering the glasses, his eyes narrowed as he thought about that. A good lot of supplies in the house?

Beside him, Rufus lowered his binoculars as well. "Looks like she's on her own."

"Yeah," Dean murmured.

"Do we leave her to it?"

Dean exhaled softly. "No. The place … Bobby was right, it's too good to pass up."

The entire compound and around ten acres lay on a small natural plateau, joined to the next ridge in the Huron National Park by a narrow saddle. The slope up to the place meant that building a fence – or a stockade – around it would be easier than he'd expected, the drop of the land adding height without effort. The lake on one side meant they would have water and protection as well. Enough timber here to last them forever, plenty of accommodation and storage, the power provided by the generator. They wouldn't find anywhere better.

And, he thought, looking back down at the house, the woman would have their protection as well. She'd been missed by the croaties so far, but that didn't mean it would last. Being here on her own wasn't a good long-term plan for her either.

"Let's go," he said, rolling to his knees and getting up. Rufus glanced back down at the woman, barely visible without the glasses and followed him.

* * *

Alex looked up as she heard the rumble of the car engines, dropping the split logs in her arms as the three vehicles drove slowly down through the trees and pulled up in front of the house.

A week ago, she'd driven into East Tawas to pick up more supplies and she'd seen the emptiness of the town, the stores and markets stripped of everything, no one there, just the faint scent of decay and decomposition rising on the breeze that blew across the lake shore. She'd found the bodies in the first house she'd entered, two of them, ripped to shreds, and had backed out, gotten into her truck and driven back to the camp as fast as she could. She'd tried every radio station her small radio could reach but there'd been nothing on the airwaves but the hiss of static.

Since then, she'd realised that she could no longer hear any traffic on the highway, or any planes taking off or landing at the county airport. In fact, she hadn't heard anything at all that wasn't of a natural origin in the last week.

A man got out of the sleek, black car at the front of the small cavalcade, and she felt her heart start to hammer as she saw the gun in his hands. _Just play it cool_, she told herself tensely, taking a step toward the porch stair.

"Can I help you?"

He looked up and walked up to the porch steps, nodding, the sunlight showing the paler tips of his short-cut hair, glancing off the polished black metal of the rifle.

"I think we can help each other," he said, his voice deep. "You know what's going on?"

She shook her head warily, her gaze skittering past him to the other cars as two more men got out. "I went into town last week. There was no one there. No one alive."

"Yeah," he said, climbing the steps slowly, the barrel of the gun pointed down, held in the crook of his arm. "You don't get TV – or radio?"

"No, I – I only got the generator working a couple of weeks ago, and there's not much reception here," Alex told him nervously, wondering if she should be lying, making up something. She backed away a step as he reached the top of the stairs.

Dean looked at her and stopped. She wasn't frightened, not yet, and he had the feeling everything she'd told him had been true. Honesty wasn't something he came across all that often, even before the end of the world. He hoped it meant he could be honest with her, about her chances of staying here alone, but there was no gain to scaring the crap out of her and he could see she was all too aware of her vulnerability. He forced his impatience back and down.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said quietly. "Has anyone else been out here?"

She shook her head, her gaze flicking down to the gun. "No."

"Chuck." He turned, looking down at the slender writer. "Bring the water."

Alex watched the man go to the blue sedan and pull out a bottle of water. She turned her gaze back to the man standing in front of her, wondering what he wanted. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in jeans and an Army jacket over a dirty plaid shirt. His face was hard, stubble shadowing his jaw and cheeks, a smear of dirt under one high cheekbone. As Chuck reached the top of the porch steps, he took the bottle from the man and held it out to her.

"There's a lot to cover, but the short version is that there's a virus, a pandemic. It's killing a lot of people. It's hard to tell who's infected at first. This is water, but it shows up if a person has the virus."

She looked at the bottle for a moment then reached out and took it, looking at the clear liquid suspiciously, lifting her gaze back to the man standing in front of her. "You want me to drink from this?"

He nodded, his eyes on hers. It seemed insane, an insane request from an insane man. But looking at the gun he was holding, she couldn't think of a single good for him to poison her when it would be quicker and less involved just to shoot her if he wanted her dead.

She unscrewed the lid and sniffed cautiously at the contents. It smelled of nothing. As water does. Didn't make it any safer, though. She held the bottle out to him.

"If it's just water, prove it," she told him nervously. He smiled, the full-lipped mouth lifting higher to one side as he took the bottle and tipped it up, swallowing a mouthful. When he handed it back, she did the same. It tasted like water. A little flat, as if it had been in a car for awhile.

"Alright," he said softly and Alex saw his shoulders drop a little as if he'd relaxed. "I'm Dean Winchester."

"Alex Tennyson," she said, screwing the lid back on the bottle and handing it back to him.

"This is Chuck Shurley," he added, handing the bottle back to Chuck. "That's, uh, Rufus Turner, Lisa Braedon and her son, Ben, Renee Taylor and her kids, Alice and Cory. Um … Castiel. And in the car, Bobby Singer."

Looking down at the group of them, she had the feeling that whatever was going on, whatever it was that had driven them here, they all felt a relief to be standing there.

"This virus – this pandemic –" she clarified to herself. "Is that why you're here?"

He nodded. "It's right across the country, spread over most of the world by now."

"And it's deadly."

"Yeah. Yeah, the kill rate is very high," he said, inclining his head as his gaze shifted behind her to the door of the house. "We need a place to stay."

She blinked at him. "Uh … you mean here?"

"Looks like you got enough room," he said, glancing around, one shoulder lifting in a shrug. "We've got supplies, weapons, skills. We'd be helping you as much as you helping us."

If what he was saying was the truth, then it would be a fair enough trade, she thought, looking down at the two women, standing by the cars with their children. She thought of the bodies in town and felt a shiver race down her spine, licking her lips nervously.

"Alright," she decided abruptly. She had no weapons of any description here, unless she counted the kitchen knives. And the thought of whatever had killed the people in town coming up here, in the darkness, had been giving her nightmares for a week. Maybe it would be better to have company. She looked down at the gun. And protection.

"How many bedrooms do you have here?" He looked past her into the house.

"Twelve."

He nodded. "If you don't mind, it would be better if we were mostly in the house, for the time being, anyway."

_For the time being?_ She pushed the question, with all its implications, aside and stepped back, gesturing to the doorway. "Come in."


	2. Chapter 2 Camp Chitaqua

**Chapter 2 Camp Chitaqua**

* * *

_**July 4, 2010. Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean followed Alex inside the house, looking around in automatic assessment. The windows were small, easy to barricade if they had to, the rooms were big and comfortable looking. He followed her through the house, grateful for the fact that she didn't talk, walking from room to room in a silent tour of the big house.

Upstairs, bedrooms lined both sides of a central hall, culminating at the southern end of the house in a gallery that overlooked the largest living area. Alex opened the doors to each of the rooms, most of them had beds, singles or doubles, unmade but clean and dust-free. She turned back before the last one, and he stopped, walking past her and opening the door. It was obviously her bedroom, the double bed made up and flowers in a jug next to the window.

"That one's taken," she said from behind him and he nodded, closing the door.

Coming down the stairs again, he thought the house would be plenty big enough to keep them. There was a spare office downstairs that would suit Bobby, keep the wheelchair on a single level. The bulk of their ordnance could go into the basement where the cool, dry air would keep the guns and ammunition in a stable state for a long time. He looked at the empty shelves in the living room, and mentally assigned them to the boxes of books that they'd been able to retrieve from Bobby's place.

In the broad front hall, he stopped, turning around to look at the woman who owned the place. Alex was watching the women and hunters through the open front door as they carried up their gear, the three children already excited about a new place, their high voices echoing in the long upstairs hallway.

She'd taken their invasion pretty calmly, he thought. Especially for a civilian. She'd also taken the news of the end of the world calmly. He wondered if the ramifications of what he'd told her had sunk in yet, or if she'd lose it once she'd had a chance to think about it. He couldn't make up his mind. Her eyes had been steady on his, concentrating on what he'd told her. That was unusual enough in itself.

"Where do you want the weapons and ammo?" Rufus asked him, walking through the door with a couple of boxes in his arms.

"Basement. There's plenty of space down there and it's cool and dry."

Once they had the perimeter fortified, they could go looking for more hunters, he thought. And more supplies. The huge pantry off the kitchen, and the root cellar below the house had a surprisingly large stock of packaged and preserved foods. Alex had told him she'd tried to fill them when she'd first come out, to limit her needs to fresh foods. It would keep them for a while at least.

"Uh, Alex," he said, walking over to her. "Are there any farms around here? Or market gardens, anyone growing local food?"

She nodded. "Down toward the lake, there're a couple but there's more if you take the road back to town and take SR 55. There are quite a lot of farms along there." She tilted her head slightly as she looked at him. "Are you after food or equipment?"

"Both," he said absently, thinking about the distances.

"My, um, neighbours, Frank and Marie, had a tractor," she told him, pointing vaguely south-east. "And some kind of digging machine, on his place. It's just down the lake road."

Neither of them said anything about where the said neighbours were or her use of the past tense. He looked at her and nodded. "Good, that'll make things easier."

"What things?"

"Well, a perimeter fence for one thing," he said with a shrug. "You got a chainsaw here?"

"Yeah, but it's not a big one," she said. "Just for me to cut firewood."

"We'll look in town for more." He frowned. "There a fuel tank, for the generator?"

"It's diesel," she confirmed. "But there's a gas tank as well, on the lakeside of the workshop."

"Got anything in it?"

She nodded. "It's full."

He filed the information away. Chainsaws, hand tools as well, since even if she had a few here, they'd need more than one of each. Drums for siphoning gasoline from the tanks to bring back here. The list of things they'd need grew in his head.

* * *

Going out to the porch after the cars had been emptied and their gear stowed away, he looked down to the small lake to the east. A whole new world out there, where none of the old rules applied. He should've felt happier about it, no more lying at least. Except, he thought, about Sam.

Castiel came out of the house and stopped beside him. The angel had confessed that his powers were more or less gone. He wasn't sure if he'd Fallen, or if Heaven had simply been closed to him.

"Everything is inside," Cas said quietly. "Rufus suggested that we go into town and get whatever we can find."

Dean nodded. "Yeah."

He glanced down at the grey pickup, parked to one side of the clearing and turned around, heading back inside. He found Alex talking to Renee in the kitchen. They were standing by the window and the early afternoon sunlight lit up their hair, Renee's pale gold and Alex's to the colour of honey. The sight caught at him, for no reason he could think of.

"We'll head into town, check out what's still there. We'll need your truck."

She looked at him, and nodded slowly. "Keys are in it."

"Thanks," he said shortly, turning and going out to the living area. Rufus and Chuck were waiting for him and he nodded slightly. Taking the pickup and the SUV, they'd have enough room for a fair load.

* * *

When they got there, the town was quiet. A long, careful recce through it told them it was like Cadillac, most of the population had been infected close to the same time, killing the few that hadn't, leaving when the ready food supplies had gone. The feed store was out of town, a mile or so along the 55 and he could see the farms Alex had mentioned, fields full of tall, bending crops. He sent Chuck and Rufus down to check out the nearest as he and Cas loaded rolls of wire and boxes of tools, cans of oil and grease and solvent, boxes of fastenings and a couple of dozen motion-sensing flood lamps, into the tray and backseat of the truck.

By the time they'd finished loading everything useful they could find, Rufus and Chuck were back, big grins on both their faces. Dean lifted a brow at them as they pulled around next to the pickup.

"What?"

"Check it out," Chuck said, opening the door and walking around to the back of the car. He opened the back doors and Dean looked in past him. Baskets and boxes were packed in there, every one filled with a variety of vegetables and early fruit. He stared at the food.

"We gonna be able to eat all this?"

"Eight adults and three kids? Yeah, that's a weeks' worth," Rufus said, coming up beside him. "Farm has a good-sized vegetable plot and an orchard, some livestock still hanging around as well, we'll need to come back for them."

"Anyone know how to look after them?" Dean asked sardonically.

"We'll figure it out," Rufus said with a shrug. "Nice to have fresh eggs again."

"Did you see the people who owned the place?"

Chuck looked away. "Yeah, we buried them."

Dean nodded abruptly. "We're ready to go."

* * *

He looked around the long dining table as he ate the food in front of him, glancing from face to face.

The house had been filled with the smells of baking when they'd gotten back, and the meal they were having was accompanied by fresh loaves of bread, as well as the fresh vegetables. He could see the relaxation in Renee's face as she glanced at her kids, admonishing them occasionally to eat their greens. Rufus and Bobby also looked a lot less tense, and he wondered briefly how much the possibility of starvation had played on their minds. Cas ate mechanically, the act not natural for the angel yet, but necessary since he was feeling hunger. Lisa was smiling, and teasing her son about something. She looked better, he thought, the bruising on her cheek had almost gone, just a faint yellow tinge around the edges now. She'd told him she'd gone out, to find out what was happening and had been attacked. She'd run, and managed to lose her pursuers. She hadn't left the house after that.

Alex sat next to her, eating silently with her gaze mostly on her plate. She seemed calm enough to him, if ill at ease with the strangers who'd invaded her property. There wasn't much he could about that.

He ducked his head back to his food and thought about the jobs they'd need to get on with over the next few weeks. Rufus said that the farm they'd been to had chickens, pigs, a couple of cows. Alex had volunteered some knowledge of looking after animals, had been raised on a smallholding and was used to them, even knew how to milk. Bobby knew about it as well, and could advise, if nothing else. They needed the fresh food, needed the nutrition of it. Tomorrow he'd have a look for some machinery to get started on the fence. There was plenty of lumber around, and he'd already been through some of Bobby's books on fortification. A solid stockade would be the ideal solution, but with so few of them, it would probably take all summer to build one. In the meantime, they could put in deep-seated posts and run the wire link around, use the flood lamps to let them know if something got in.

"We need a radio," Bobby said, looking down the table at Dean. "Something with a good bit of juice."

Dean nodded. There was no other way to get in touch with whatever hunters were still alive, and a lot of them would have SSB radios in their setups.

"Chuck can have a look in town tomorrow," he said, looking at the slim prophet. "Take Cas with you."

There hadn't been time to check out every store in town, but he thought one might have catered to the gadget crowd.

* * *

Dean stretched back in the armchair, feeling the aches and pains of the days' work stiffening his muscles. He got up and walked out to the porch. The night air felt full of moisture, still and heavy. From the woods to the north, there was the occasional rustle or owl hoots, and every now and then he could hear a splash in the lake, signalling the presence of fish, at least, jumping out for the insects that were increasing in numbers with the growing warmth of the season.

He heard a creak from one of the boards and looked around the corner, seeing Alex leaning on the rail.

"There's a card game going on in there," he said lightly, walking over to her.

She looked around at him and back to the moonlit-silvered surface of the lake. "I'm not – I'm not really a people-person," she said.

He leaned against the post and looked at her profile. "Yeah, well, given a choice, I'm not really either."

"Doesn't seem like we've got too many choices now."

"No," he said. "But we're alive. And we'll stay that way."

"What killed the people in town?" She turned to look over her shoulder at him. "That wasn't a virus. They were … torn apart, as if a bear or a mountain lion had gone in the house."

He dragged in a breath, wondering where to start, how much to say. His instincts told him to tell her all of it, that she wouldn't fold if he didn't sugar-coat it. "The virus changes behaviour. Makes people insane with rage, with a … killer instinct," he said. "They attack anyone around."

"Is it contagious?"

He shook his head. "The transfer is blood to blood. Infected blood has to come into contact with your blood to become infected."

"Which is why they attack people, I guess," she said softly.

He ducked his head at the observation, hiding the feeling of relief at her pragmatic grasp of the situation. His instincts were usually right. "Yeah, looks that way."

"Did you – did you come a long way? To get here?" she asked hesitantly.

"From South Dakota."

"So you saw – you saw a lot of places, on the way?"

He saw what she was tip-toeing around and nodded. "Yeah, we saw a few of the cities, a lot of small towns. They were all the same. I guess that a lot of people left stuff on, stoves or things like that. A lot of the cities had fires still burning, some of the towns had been burned to the ground."

"Do you think survivors were trying to protect themselves?"

"I don't know," he said, his expression hardening with the memories. "I don't think there are that many survivors."

"Renee said she survived the first attacks, survived until you found her." She looked at him again. "So there could be others, like her?"

"There could be," he allowed warily. "There are some folks we're going to be looking for."

"Others like you, you mean?"

He wasn't sure what she'd meant by that. "Yeah, like me."

"Are you a soldier? Or something like that?" she asked.

He felt his defensiveness subside at the question, the corner of his mouth tucking in as he hid a smile. "Something like that."

"If you go out along Aulerich Road, there are a lot of factories along the stretch to the local airport. I think one of them does timber products, and another one has a lot of concrete stuff. You could probably find what you need for the perimeter fence along there, machinery too."

Dean looked at her thoughtfully. "Thanks, I'll take a look out there tomorrow."

"There you are," Lisa said from the doorway, walking over to them and tucking her arm through his. "Rufus wants to talk to you about something."

Dean nodded, turning as he felt the press of her breast against his arm and walking with her back inside the house.

* * *

For the next four weeks, everybody worked.

Dean, Rufus, Chuck and Castiel cut down trees, stripping the branches and setting them into the holes dug by the auger on the tractor they'd found at the neighbouring farm, the fence enclosing the camp growing in length day by day.

Alex, Lisa and Renee, helped by the children, dug into the hard soil in the clearing to the south of the house and cabins, digging out beds, filling them with anything they could find – paper, leaves, grass cuttings, manure from the farms around them and piling the turned earth back on top. A hastily erected chicken house and set of yards kept a dozen chickens, three pigs and a black and white Friesian cow with a calf at foot, and Bobby had taken an old-fashioned rotary beater and set of wooden spoons and made a butter churn, devising a cheese press, with a turned wood bowl, lid and long bolt. Both were labour intensive but worth the effort.

There was nothing they could do about missing the north's short growing season, but the erection of a glasshouse, the frame and panes scavenged from the doors and windows of the houses in town, against the southern wall of the house meant that some things could be grown with a chance of success. Chuck took Alex and Ben down to the farms along the highway each week and they came back loaded with fresh produce and sacks of flour and whole wheat, barley and corn and sugar and salt. None of them really had much of an idea of how to preserve food, other than making jams and jellies, and a trip to the local library had netted several boxfuls of books on salting, drying, pickling, preserving, making butter and cheeses, livestock handling and a dozen other subjects that they needed to know about. The town had briefly been popular with the subset of population longing to get back to Nature and the section in the small library had been extensive.

With Rufus' help, Alex and Chuck had gotten the boiler in the basement going again, and the cold lake water was pumped to a gravity-fed tank above the house to give them hot water inside finally. Chopping the wood for the old-fashioned furnace and keeping it burning was Ben's job, and he took it seriously, stoking the fire every morning.

Bobby spent hours on the radio, searching for other hunters, for other survivors. He managed to get in contact with three hunters that he and Rufus knew between them. All three were on their way, but it would take weeks for them to get there, having to bypass and skirt around the major cities and what the hunters called the Red Zones, between themselves, areas where the croatie populations had remained high for reasons they didn't want to think about.

They didn't talk about Sam, or the contradictory and often incoherent rumours floating around about what the devil was doing. He was holed up in Illinois, in Florida, in Hawaii; he was killing people in Vegas and trying to get the space shuttle operational down in Canaveral. Some of the rumours were fourth or fifth-hand according to the hunters they'd been delivered through. There was no point listening to them and no point talking about it until they had hard data.

* * *

_**August 5, 2010.**_

Dean opened his eyes at the soft creak of the bathroom door, slopping a little water over the edge of the bath as he shifted upwards. Lisa closed it behind her and smiled at him, walking to the tub.

"Thought you'd be in here," she said, looking down.

He watched her undressing, feeling a familiar stirring, despite the aches that had prompted the desire to get some relief in hot water in the first place. He wasn't all that sure that being with her was a great idea, at this time, in these circumstances, but it had happened gradually over the past couple of weeks and he couldn't pretend it didn't help, in some small way, to feel someone close to him in the night, someone to hold.

She stepped into the hot water and he made room for her, listening to her deep sigh as she settled against him and the water covered her shoulders.

"How are the supplies holding out?" he asked, sliding his hands around her waist.

"No idea," she said, arching back a little under the touch. "I think Alex is keeping an eye on them."

"What about the garden?"

Lisa rolled over, linking her hands behind his neck, her breath light on his mouth as she looked at him with a faintly exasperated expression. "You don't really want to talk about this stuff now, do you? Locked door, wet, naked lady right in front of you?"

He smiled slightly, his arms closing around her and drawing her closer. "No, probably not."

It wasn't what he'd thought it'd be like, this relationship that he'd drifted into. They shared a bedroom, and for the last couple of weeks, he'd woken with her lying beside him, gone to bed every night and felt her roll over to curl around him. There wasn't a lot they shared through the days, or talked about even.

It was a long way from a normal life, but at the same time, it was closer than he'd been to one since Lawrence. In one place, a routine gradually becoming established, knowing what he had to do when he got up each day … it was nothing short of bizarre. At the back of his mind, every day, every hour, every minute, he was aware of time ticking away, time that he needed to wipe out the populations of demon-infected humans, time that he needed to kill the devil and somehow save his brother.

He couldn't talk about it, not to Bobby or Rufus, or to Cas or Chuck, although they knew about it, knew that it was eating at him. He sure as hell couldn't talk about it with Lisa, anymore than he could tell her the truth about his life and what happened in the years since he'd seen her last, and what he'd seen and what he'd done.

He didn't know, exactly, what had happened to him in Hell. Didn't know what he'd brought back out with him, or what he'd left behind. Didn't know if he would ever find the pieces that had been torn away. He'd wished for his feelings to be burned out of him, cauterised and deadened and gone. They hadn't been, at least not the ones that fed him poison through the night and screamed in his head through the day, but he couldn't find anything more than an incidental caring for the woman in his arms, couldn't look at the feelings in her eyes when she looked at him a certain way, couldn't make himself feel more than a sexual affection. She was under his protection, and he'd die before he let any harm come to her or Ben. He wanted her, desire rising quickly when she offered. He couldn't ask though, couldn't bring himself to make the first move. None of it was the same as what he thought she felt for him, or what he thought he should be feeling, what he thought he had felt, when he'd seen her last.

A shudder rippled through him as ache and pressure built quickly, and she rode him harder, her head tipping back. He tightened his control, drawing back from edge as his hand slid between their slick bodies. He might be fucking her without feeling, but he'd be damned if he was going to fuck her without getting her off.

* * *

_**August 30, 2010.**_

The afternoon sun was merciless, beating down on the cleared ground and reflecting up from the dried white grasses that had been trampled flat. There wasn't a single breath of wind from the lake side or anywhere else and Dean felt his sweat drip from his hair down his neck as he watched the four shooters in front of him.

"Renee," he called out and she lifted the barrel of the rifle, steadied it and squeezed the trigger, the shot almost amplified in the still air, a round black hole appearing in the chest of the man-sized target that stood twenty yards from her.

"Good, reload." He looked at Ben. "Ben."

The boy raised the rifle and squeezed the trigger, the sound flatter from the smaller calibre weapon, the hole right over the heart.

"Good job, reload. Lise," he said, watching as Ben turned and worked the bolt.

Lisa held the shotgun at shoulder height, and pulled the trigger, the recoil knocking her back slightly, the spread of the shot touching the top of the head, but nowhere else.

"Too high, watch the recoil," he said. She nodded and racked the slide, loading another shell.

"Alex."

She lifted the rifle and steadied it, squeezing the trigger, her back foot taking the recoil easily. The gunshot echoed in the woods and he saw the hole at the centre of the chest.

"Good, reload."

All four were soaked in sweat, standing in the blistering sun. They weren't bad, mostly with stationary targets now. He couldn't think of a safe way to let them practice on moving ones though.

"Ben!" he barked suddenly, striding fast toward the boy. "Finger off the trigger – what the hell did I tell you?"

"Uh, keep your finger on the guard until you're ready to shoot?" Ben looked down at the ground.

"And where was your finger?"

"On the trigger, sir."

"Unload. Clean the gun and put it away," Dean snapped. "You're done for the day."

"Dean, it was one mistake," Lisa said, turning to him. "He's the only one of us who actually enjoys this!"

"One mistake could've killed you, or Renee or me," Dean grated, swinging around to face her. "Or it could've wasted ammunition that he needed to kill something before it killed him! Yeah, he gets the punishment appropriate to the situation. If you'd done it, you'd be out here another hour, practising until you can hit the damned target."

He dragged in a deep breath, pushing down the mix of fear and anger that was filling his veins, aware of how he sounded. "Look, this isn't for fun. This is to save your life, her life –" He gestured vaguely in Renee's direction. "His life. You learn this now, and you learn it right, so that if you need it, it'll be there!"

Lisa stared at him for a moment, then turned away, her mouth thinned out to a tight line.

Sam would've laughed, he thought bitterly as he walked back to the end of the line where he could see them all. The words had been straight out of his father's mouth, yelled at the two of them often enough to have sunk in, down to marrow level.

"Again. Renee," he called out, wiping a hand over his face tiredly.

He watched them fire at the target again, Lisa holding the shotgun a bit more carefully, her weight further back the second time and managing to get the shot over most of the head and chest. He was vaguely aware of Ben, stomping back toward the house, and Rufus, sitting in the shade of the line of trees on the lake side, watching silently.

When the echoes faded from Alex's shot, he nodded. "That's enough for today."

He watched Renee thumb the safety on, and shift her grip to the barrel, watched Lisa shuck the remaining shells and put them into her pocket, watched Alex unload her rifle and thumb the safety on, the three of them walking silently back down the path to the house, barrels down. He didn't expect them to get to the point where the training was as ingrained as it was in himself. But Ben could, he was still young enough. And he wasn't going to let the boy get away with bad habits that could kill him, wasn't going to only half-train him. The world they lived in now was worse than the one he'd grown up in. There was no room for mistakes of any kind in this one.

"So," Rufus said casually, getting to his feet as Dean walked over to him. "I'm thinking you got a better idea of how your Dad felt at the moment?"

Dean looked at him sourly. "We're in a war situation, Rufus. If it was just hunting, I wouldn't be riding them this hard."

The older hunter grinned at him. "Yeah, well, guns ain't toys. Not sure what you're going to about a general lack of interest, mind."

"No, me either," he admitted, turning and starting down the path to the house, Rufus falling into step beside him.

* * *

"Lisa, can I have a moment?" He put the guns back in the cupboard, taking hers last. Cleaning and checking the guns after every practice had become a routine that they were all used to.

"Alright, I know," she said, looking up at him, when Renee had left, closing the door behind her. "I shouldn't have said anything."

He leaned back against the cupboard. "No. You shouldn't have."

"I'm sorry." She looked at him with a shrug. "It came out before I thought about it."

"I'm pushing you all so that you have some chance of staying alive," he said quietly.

"I know."

"This isn't about equality or feminism or anything else, Lise," he pressed, looking at her intently. "We're an army now, you have to follow orders."

"Dean, I get it. I do," she said, taking a step toward and sliding her arms around his ribs. "It won't happen again."

"Okay." He straightened up, smiling as he unhooked her arms from around him. "Got stuff to do."

She stepped back to let him pass and he felt her gaze following him as he walked out of the room.

She'd told him she hated the guns, hated him teaching Ben how to use them. He understood how she felt but the fact was that they were still vulnerable here, hell, they were vulnerable in this life. He couldn't see ahead to a time where anything would be as it once had been. And it was the one thing he could do, get them ready to face whatever came at them. It was the only thing he could do.

He walked outside, going down the steps and between the cabins to the lake. It was still hot, though darkness had fallen an hour ago, and he could hear the rumble of thunder, across the lake. Without thinking about it, he pulled off his boots and clothes, leaving them in a heap on the pebbled shore and walked into the water, passing through the still-warm shallows and feeling the cooler, deeper water with a sigh of relief. He swam out, slowly, until he felt the tensions of the afternoon seeping out of him and floated on his back, looking up at the black sky with its millions of tiny, twinkling stars.

For a moment or two, he lay on the water, cool and calm, staring at the sky. Then reality sank its claws back into him, tightening around his organs, rending him with the knowledge that he had people under his care. That his brother was imprisoned by Lucifer and doing who knew what. That no matter how much he wanted to let it all go, he couldn't.

He rolled over, swimming back to shore with a powerful stroke, pushing himself harder and harder as the lights of the house got closer. He stumbled out of the water and pulled on his clothes savagely, yanking his boots over his bare feet. It would never end, and maybe that was for the best because he couldn't pretend that he could ever live in a normal world either.

* * *

_**September 15, 2010.**_

Dean stood by the big gates of the camp, leaning back against a tree trunk and waiting. They'd heard the vehicles going across the wooden bridge out of town a half hour ago, the sound carrying over the water and in the silence of the woods. He glanced at Rufus and Cas, both waiting quietly on the other side of the gates, guns held loosely.

The wrought iron and steel mesh gates had been liberated, complete with the rolling tracks and gas-driven motor, from the timber product factory out on the road to the airport, along with a load of high link wire netting, rolls of razor wire and some useful heavy earth-moving equipment. The perimeter fence was nine feet high from the ground, with a four foot drop beneath it, leaning outward slightly. Log posts reinforced the strength of it, one for every four metal posts. Ten flood lamps, powered now by solar panels and batteries, sat on the tops of the log posts.

He wasn't sure it would stand a really concerted attack, but it would keep out smaller parties, and it would give them enough warning to get down to the fence and take out whatever it was that was trying to get in.

The first vehicle came around the bend of the road, engine chugging quietly, and he straightened up, looking down the road as the rest followed. There were six altogether, two Army troop carriers in the lead, followed by a big SUV, a pickup, a short school bus and bringing up the rear, an armoured truck with the bank's logo still painted on the sides.

The lead truck pulled up in front of the gate and the driver's door opened, the familiar shock of curly red hair lit up in the crisp morning sunshine.

"Winchester," the man said, strolling up to the gate. "Sorry we're late."

Dean grinned at Boze Greenwood, inclining his head slightly. "Yeah, Boze, you shoulda called, let us know."

Boze laughed. "Next time, I'll be sure to remember that."

He looked around, brows rising. "Quite a setup you got here."

"You have no idea," Dean told him dryly. Boze looked at Rufus and smiled.

"Shoulda known you'd survive, old man."

"Takes more than the end of the world to take me out, Boze," Rufus said dismissively, his eye travelling along the line of vehicles stopped outside the gates, engines rumbling. "How many you bring, anyway?"

"Oh, we got a bunch," Boze said, glancing back over his shoulder. "A few survivors we picked up on the way. That's what held us up, mostly."

"Everyone checked out?" Dean asked quietly.

"Yep, all clean, green humans here."

"Alright, then come on in," he said, walking to the gate switch. "Stop when you get to the cabins."

He pressed the switch for the gate motor and the gates obediently trundled apart on their tracks. Dean stepped back and watched them drive through, catching glimpses of nervous faces behind the dirty windows of the vehicles as they passed by.

He closed the gates as the armoured truck drove over the rails and turned to walk after the vehicles, Rufus and Cas walking beside him.

"That's a lot of people," Rufus said quietly. Cas glanced at Dean.

"Yeah, well, we're gonna need them."

The older man snorted softly. "We might need them, but can we feed them?"

Dean nodded. "We'll have to, won't we?"

* * *

Alex stood on the porch, watching the vehicles that came down the leaf-covered drive and pulled up between the cabins and the house. A part of her was happy at the sight of so many survivors, climbing out of the bus and cars. Another part froze in dread at the thought of feeding this many, with their small greenhouse and their single cow.

They'd gone through all the farms nearby, had started to circle out on a wider circumference now to scavenge what they could find. She thought that the supplies they had would probably feed everyone until at least Spring, but the fresh food would be much tighter. Dean had spoken of hunting game, up in the national forest to the north and fishing in the lake. She wondered if it would be that simple.

The first two trucks were Army, ex-Army now, she guessed. The driver of the first one was tall, with curly red hair cut close to his head, fair skin, reddened by the sun, dressed in jeans and Army surplus. She saw the big handgun holstered against his hip and watched as he pulled out a long automatic rifle from the cab. On the passenger side, a smaller man got out, older. Greying hair, grizzled stubble covering his jaw and watchful eyes that scanned the area ceaselessly. He too pulled out an automatic gun from the cab, slinging the strap over one shoulder.

Another two hard-looking men and a woman got out from the second troop carrier. The SUV disgorged two women, a man and a child and Alex's eyes widened slightly as she saw that one of the women was pregnant, quite heavily so. The bus had held another group of men and women and another child.

They stood in front of the house and she watched them looking around, hope and excitement on their faces. All were thin and dirty and she thought this place must have looked pretty close to paradise compared to what they'd been through.

She shifted her gaze to the men walking down the drive as they came around the bend, focussing unconsciously on the man in the middle. Even after so many weeks, he was still an enigma to her, hard-edged and intolerant of mistakes or frailties, yet capable of great patience and kindness, and even a certain charm when he chose to reveal it. At first, she'd thought him just to be very straight-forward, without the need to lie or hide how he felt. Now, she realised that in itself was another mask, another layer. He was the unquestioned leader of the group, and she thought, he would assimilate these people as well, becoming their leader too, despite the fact that a few of the men who'd arrived were years older. He radiated some kind of authority that none of the others questioned. She wasn't sure why. She'd seen his unguarded moments a couple of times, where weariness had filled his face, and an uncertain dread had filled his eyes. They'd been gone in an instant, but she'd recognised the feelings for what they were.

She turned as Lisa came out of the house and walked down the steps. "Come inside, everyone. I'm sure you're hungry and tired."

Alex caught Renee's eye unwillingly, seeing the other woman's wry smile. She shrugged it off. If Lisa was willing to take over as hostess, she didn't mind. She was mid-way through inventorying the pantry anyway. Turning away, she headed back into the house and across to the kitchen. Her headcount had been fourteen, twelve adults and two more children. It was going to screw up their planned rations, unless they'd brought food with them, or could go out further afield and get more.

* * *

Dean walked into the house with Boze and Tim Janklow, the two hunters looking around appreciatively as they came inside.

"Very nice setup, how'd you find this?" Boze whistled softly as he saw the comfortable rooms.

"Bobby remembered the place, but there was a new owner," Dean said, looking around the crowded area for Alex. "She figured it was better to have us here than not."

He looked over the people standing there, nodding as he recognised Rona Marsh and Franklin Rooney, hunters he'd met before the roadhouse had burned to the ground. "Who are all these people?"

Boze grinned slightly and turned to the room. "Ah folks, have your attention for a minute. Time for introductions."

He gestured to a tall, wiry man standing close by. "Father Michael, this is Dean Winchester. He's running this outfit."

"I have to say I'm very glad to meet you, Mr Winchester," Father Michael said, a hint of Irish burr in his voice. "We've been on the road for months and I despaired of ever finding anything liveable, let alone this civilised."

"Well, it's not entirely Club Med, padre," Dean hedged, taking his hand and feeling the strength in the priest's grip.

"This is Duncan, and Alanna. We found them on the outskirts of Detroit," the priest said, turning to the teenagers standing behind him. "And Debbie Elliott and her daughter, Mary," he said, gesturing to the pregnant woman next to them.

A tall woman walked past them, holding out her hand. "Risa Blaum."

"Blaum?" Dean asked curiously, looking at the dark, almond-shaped eyes and dead straight, shining black hair.

"My mother was Chinese," she said, smiling at him.

"Ah yeah, Risa's done her tour in the Israeli army, a few years ago," Boze said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Can handle herself in a firefight."

"Good," Dean said, releasing her hand. "The more the merrier."

"Franklin and Rona, you know," Tim said, gesturing to the man by the fireplace. "And Maurice."

Maurice stepped closer, extending his hand. "Long time, Dean. I was sorry to hear about your father."

"Yeah," Dean said. "Where were you?"

"Down near Texas," Sweeney told him. "Lucky to get out."

"Glad you made it."

"Sam here too?" Maurice asked.

"No." The single word was delivered curtly, Dean turning away.

Boze looked at Dean and gestured to the other woman, standing with her child, a little boy of around six. "That's Michelle Todd. Found her in Pennsylvania."

"Where's Singer, anyways?" Tim looked around the room. "Couldn't shut him up over the airwaves."

"Have to lower your eyeline, Janklow," Bobby said sourly and they turned to look at him as he wheeled his chair across to them. "Had a run-in with a demon."

"Sorry to hear that, Bobby," Boze said. Tim nodded.

"So what's going on with the rest of the country?" Dean asked them, glancing at Bobby who looked back at him sourly.

"Well, we got croaties everywhere, as you might've guessed," Boze said, looking up as Lisa appeared at the door to the dining room.

"Food's ready, come and eat it while it's hot," she said, raising her voice to reach the group spread across the room.

"Come on, we can talk while we eat, been days since a solid square," Boze muttered to Dean, following him into the other room.

The dining table wasn't big enough and Bobby muttered something to him about working alternative arrangements for meals. For the moment though, everyone had squeezed in, sitting tightly together, eating as fast as they could.

"Practically the whole East Coast is a red zone," Boze said in between mouthfuls. "Big cities, of course, so the infection spread faster there and the population kept them going for a long time. Not so bad up the middle, but there's not much food left, like driving through an area where locusts have been, the survivors and the croaties pretty much took everything."

"What about the western states?"

Franklin leaned forward, looking up the table toward them. "Forget about it. California's had three big 'quakes in the last three months and what the virus didn't get they did. There's nothing left there, from TJ up to Seattle, but ruins and ghouls and cannibals."

Dean looked up at him. "So they've started then?"

Boze nodded. "Oh, yeah, well, kind of expected. There's not much else to eat and I guess it's handy."

"Great."

"Doesn't make much difference to us, they go down easier than most things we've hunted," Tim added, his appetite clearly unaffected by the conversation.

"At the moment," Bobby said dourly. "That might change."

The hunters looked at him in confusion. "What do you mean?"

"Just because the virus acts one way when a person is first infected doesn't mean to say it'll stay that way. Most viruses that are too virulent, they kill their hosts. I don't think Pestilence would have made something that was going to do one job and that's it."

Dean nodded slowly, chewing and swallowing. "I thought the virus was supposed to wipe out people, make it paradise on earth for the demons?"

"Demons like having meatsuits around," Bobby pointed out acerbically. "Hard to come by those if the entire population's dead."

"Or maybe Lucifer's planning on killing the demons next," Dean countered, waving his fork for emphasis.

"He won't do that until he's defeated Heaven," Rufus remarked. "And he's a long way from achieving that goal."

Boze and Tim and Franklin looked at each other. "You boys sound like you know a lot more about what's going on than we do."

"Yeah, we'll discuss it later," Dean said quietly, his eye cutting to the rest of the occupants of the table. The civilian occupants.

"You don't think they're going to need to know this?" Rufus asked him in a low voice.

"Not right now."

* * *

"So," Boze said as he stood beside Dean on the porch an hour later. "Where're we bunking down?"

Dean glanced back at the house. "The women and kids can stay in the house, just a couple of us there as well. Everyone else gets a cabin, or shares a cabin. They're in good shape, just need cleaning. There'll be plenty of room for everyone."

Boze nodded. "Father Michael is thinking loudly of setting up a church somewheres."

Dean shrugged. "If he thinks it'll help, it doesn't bother me. He can have a cabin to himself, use the other room for services, if he wants to." He glanced sideways at the man standing next to him. "Not like we can't use all the help we can get."

Boze laughed softly. "Got that right."

"We've been picking over the area, for food and anything that's gonna be useful but you guys coming along now will help. Teams of three, take the trucks and get food, tools, weapons, ammo, whatever you find."

"What about training? I'm thinking you want to take this fight out of here, sooner or later?"

"Yeah. Everyone who can hold a gun is trained with them," Dean said, watching the newcomers getting their few belongings from the cars and carrying them inside. "We've got a helluva lot of work to do, cleaning up this mess. Especially if Bobby's right."

"I heard something else, on the way here," Boze said slowly, rubbing his hand over his face.

Dean raised an eyebrow at him. "What?"

"Found a little group of people down in Missouri, said that a lot of people were being gathered up, survivors like, and taken to the bigger towns and the cities."

"To do what?"

"They weren't sure, but maybe clean up, maybe to work …" Boze looked away. "Said that someone was running things, getting things working again. Said they saw the lights go on in Wichita."

"Getting the power up again?" Dean thought about that. Lucifer? Why?

"That's what they said," Boze confirmed, shrugging. "They were in a bad way, so maybe it's not that reliable. They also said that some of the people who were grabbing folks, they weren't infected, either by the virus or by demons."

Regular people, working for the devil, of their own free will. That was unexpected. "How'd they know?"

"One of 'em was Saul Jessup," Boze said. "You ever meet him?"

Dean nodded. Saul had been a hunter for a long time, had been a regular at the roadhouse, a good friend of Ellen's.

"He threw a bottle of holy water over one of them, he told me," Boze continued. "Said it had no effect."

"Where is he?"

"He died. Something clawed him up pretty good, took a few people from the party he was trying to protect."

"Naturally." He tipped back his head, closing his eyes. It wasn't just the croaties, and the devil, no there were still plenty of monsters out and about and they had to deal with them too.

"Alright," he said, exhaling deeply. "Who else knows that?"

"No one, ran into Saul before I found Tim and the others." Boze leaned on the railing. "Thought it wasn't something that would do anyone much good to know until we could do something about it."

"Yeah, well, let's keep it that way until we can."

"Right you are, boss." He straightened up, stretching out his back. "Best feed I've had in a couple of months."

Dean smiled humourlessly. "You'll need it, we got a lot to do."

He turned back to the railing as Boze walked away. Father Michael had already put his small flock put to work on cleaning the other cabins, cobwebs and dust and leaves swept from the interiors and porches, windows being repaired and washed. His eyes narrowed as he saw Alex walk up to the grey-haired priest, offering her hand to him. She hadn't been at the table for lunch and he hadn't seen her since everyone had arrived. He needed to ask about the supplies.

He turned from the rail and almost ran into Lisa, standing behind him.

"Hey."

"Hey," she looked up at him with a smile. "Debbie, Michelle and Alanna are settling in upstairs. Um, Rona and Risa have decided to share a cabin. Rufus and Chuck and Cas have all moved their stuff down to the cabins already."

"Good," he said, unsure of what else to say. "We need to think of another arrangement for meals, there's too many of us."

Lisa nodded. "I thought that we might divide it up so that hunters eat first, and then the women and kids, then anyone else."

"Sounds alright," he said, glancing back over the rail. Both Alex and the priest had disappeared from view.

"One other thing that might be a problem," Lisa said, resting her hand on his arm, the light touch restraining him as he took a step toward the steps. "Relationships."

"What?"

"Well, we've got eleven men here, and eight women," she said, looking at him. "Sooner or later some of them are probably going to get involved or at least want to have sex."

"And?"

"And it's going to cause problems unless there are some rules about it."

"I'm –" he said, looking down at her. "I'm not telling people what they can and can't do."

"You'd rather have jealousy and hurt feelings and everyone hating each other?"

"No," he said, looking away in frustration. "They're adults; they can sort it for themselves."

"Alright, well, tell whoever's going out next that we'll need a good supply of condoms, at least."

He raised a quizzical brow at her expression.

"We have one pregnant woman here now, and I'm not looking forward to delivering her baby," she said acerbically. "We don't need any more."

"Alright, Chuck's handling that. Let him know," he said, heading for the porch steps.

He felt her gaze boring into the back of his neck as he hit the ground and strode away.

Jesus! Didn't he have enough to worry about without chaperoning everyone's sex life? He stopped abruptly in front of a cabin and looked left and right. And while he'd noticed that Debbie was pregnant, since it was hard to ignore, he didn't need to be thinking about her going into labour or delivering babies either. He heard a murmur of voices close by and walked around the cabin.

Alex and Father Michael were standing beside the small building, looking at the side wall.

"You could close off half the big room," she was saying to the priest. "Put a door in here for the church entrance?"

"Yes, yes, that will work," he said, turning to look at Dean as he walked toward them.

"Everyone settling in, Father?" he asked, looking at the man.

"Nicely, thank you," Father Michael inclined his head. "I would like to set up services here."

"Knock yourself out." Dean shrugged, glancing at Alex.

"I thought we could use the church for school lessons through the week," she added, looking at Father Michael, then turning to him. "Debbie was a grade school teacher."

"Sounds great," he said, a little nonplussed by the conversation. "Can I talk to you?"

"Before you go, Dean, I was wondering if we could get a team to the timber factory to get some more dressed lumber?"

Dean's gaze returned to the priest. "Sure, yeah. Tomorrow, first thing."

"Thank you," Father Michael said, walking away from them around the back of the cabin.

"I take it you're religiously inclined?" he asked Alex.

"No," she said. "But I think he'll be a comfort to some of the people here, and with four children under six and another one on the way, it seemed a good use of resources to have a school room as well."

She pushed her hair back off her forehead and looked at him. "What did you want to talk about?"

"The supplies," he said, making a vague gesture in the direction of the path that led down to the lake and turning toward it. He wanted to have at least one conversation without interruptions. "Is what we have going to feed everyone?"

"Not through the winter, not without rationing," Alex said, following him, the breeze freshening slightly off the water and cooling the afternoon heat. "We'll need more chickens, and another cow, and it would be an idea to get some milking goats, if we could find them as well."

"Why?" He frowned at her as she came up beside him.

"Some kids have trouble with cow's milk, and it's a good substitute for formula, if it comes to that," she answered, looking down at the path. "We haven't looked at any of the farms out along the 23 yet. We could send a couple of parties down there, maybe use the troop carriers or find some flatbed trucks, and get as much as we can? We've been getting mostly seed for next spring, but the more staples we have, the better off everyone's going to be, if they're expected to work hard."

He nodded. "Alright, Boze and Tim can tackle that tomorrow." He stopped at the rocky incline down to the lake, leaning against a tree as he looked over the water. "What else do we need?"

She ducked her head, thinking of the lists she and Renee had been making. "Linen, medical supplies, clothing – winter clothing – all sizes, shoes, wool or even fleece if they can find any, so that we can make more if we need to. Needles, thread, fabric, buttons, zippers to repair the clothing we do have," she rattled off immediately. "Uh … more preserving equipment. If we can get the goats, I can make soap but I'll need lye. I can make it from potash, but it would helpful to get in the bottles if we can find it. Quilts or doonas or sleeping bags, it gets damned cold here in the winter months and everyone will feel better if they're not freezing. The same goes for firewood, actually." She turned and gestured back to the cabins. "They all have wood stoves, but we'll need a lot of firewood."

"That's not a problem," Dean said, making a mental list. Another one. He thought of what Lisa had said and looked at the woman beside him, wondering about her opinion on the problem. "Ah, about the … uh … relationships in the camp, that might be … well, awkward …"

Alex smiled a little. "Renee mentioned that, when she saw the new people," she told him. "Look, people take responsibility when it's given to them. You want them to behave responsibly? Give them loads of responsibility and trust them to handle it. If it doesn't work out, you can, I guess you can go back to rules and punishment, but I'd give them a chance first."

He felt the tension ease out of the back of his neck at the suggestion. It beat the hell out of posting a set of rules and expecting people to abide by them. "You think I can go sergeant-major on their asses and they'll just jump to attention?"

"No," she answered carefully. "But I think you can give everyone an area that they're in charge of, and then leave it up to them to face everyone else if they fail to do what they're supposed to?" she suggested, glancing sideways at him.

"Yeah," he said, smiling slightly. It would keep people doing their jobs without the need for management, or much, at any rate. Looking down at her, he noticed suddenly that she looked thinner, quite a lot thinner, the bones of her face showing clearly for the first time since he'd met her.

"You eating enough?" he asked, his tone a little brusque, not sure if the question was personal or a part of his responsibilities.

Her brow wrinkled up in surprise and he got the feeling that she'd found his observation of her as unexpected as he had.

"Yeah, just working harder now," she said, gesturing vaguely behind her in the direction of the camp. "I thought I'd have all year to get this place into shape."

Looking back up the path at the cabins and house and buildings, he nodded. "Armageddon puts you on a time-table you can't shake free of." He turned back to her. "Give Boze a list of everything we need, what they need to find, and how much we need, including the livestock."

Alex nodded readily and he started back up the path, stopping as he realised she wasn't following and looking back. "You alright?"

"Yeah," she said, turning slowly and walking after him. "Just … is there any chance anyone will be able to go to one of the big towns? Maybe Saginaw?"

"I don't know, why?"

"There are some things that the little towns, and the farms, probably won't have," she said, brows drawn together. "They're not absolutely essential, but they'd be very nice to have for the long term."

She caught up to him and they kept walking to the house. Dean thought about the dangers of going near a town like that. "It's risky," he said quietly. "Whatever you want, it's got to be worth the risk of losing people."

"At this stage, it's not," she said firmly. "But further along, it might well be."

"What are we talking about?"

"Things we can't make, or at least not very effectively and not quickly enough," she told him. "Broad spectrum antibiotics. Morphine-based painkillers. Sutures. Alcohol. Reference books, especially medical and engineering. Things like that."

The doctor's office and the small medical centre in Tawas had both been burned down to the ground. When he'd seen them, he'd guessed that some of the survivors had done it, covering their tracks or laying an ambush for the croaties. Now he wondered. Most of those things meant the difference between living and dying in a lot of cases. The immune system of the race in general had been reduced in strength in the last hundred years.

"Maybe later," he said. "Just before winter. A small group might have better luck."

"Okay."

He shot a quick glance at her. He still didn't have a good idea of who she really was, or how she worked, he thought. Most people he could figure out fast, a lifetime of careful observation had trained him in seeing things he couldn't have picked out individually, just knowing what kind of a person he was talking to from the subconscious clues that people revealed in ordinary conversation. Alex didn't fall into an easy category. She was practical, he'd realised, more than emotional. She seemed to be ahead of him in what the camp needed, over the short term and the long term and she was refreshingly solution-oriented, never just pointing out a problem, but offering a way to deal with anything she raised with him. She rarely argued, never questioned his decisions once he'd made them and didn't seem to find silence threatening at all. He hadn't asked her to take over keeping a close check on their supplies, or the maintenance of their livestock, or even the researching of better ways to ensure that they had what they needed to see out the winter.

"You okay with doing all this?" he asked her curiously as they neared the house.

She glanced at him and shrugged. "It's not a difficult job," she told him.

For her, maybe not, he thought. She didn't seem to mind it, and it saved him having to do it himself. He looked up at the raised porch and saw Rufus waiting for him, and he lengthened his stride a little, going to meet him.


	3. Chapter 3 On the Devil's Timetable

**Chapter 3 On the Devil's Time-Table**

* * *

_**Cooke Dam Pond, Huron National Forest**_

Dean crouched in the thick undergrowth next to the tree trunk, the cool dampness of the ground mist rising up around him. Twenty feet to his right, Boze was likewise frozen in the cover of a clump of bracken fern, barely visible in the mottled greys and greens of the camouflage shirt, waiting patiently.

The white-tail buck had a wide, six-point rack, and the foraging had been good over the summer, all the abandoned farms filled with rich crops. The deer population had exploded as the wild animals had spread out from the forest territories and into the cultivated lands, not just deer either. Nature didn't like a vacuum.

He raised the barrel of the rifle he held, drawing a bead on the buck's side, behind the shoulder, and squeezed gently on the trigger. He heard the flat crack of Boze's shot a fraction of a second after his and the buck dropped to the ground, a clean kill.

Dean stood up, head cocked to one side as he heard the truck start up from down the trail.

"How many are we taking?" Boze got to his feet, stretching his back as he looked over at him.

"Enough to fill the freezers," Dean said, walking to the buck and pulling out his knife.

A pale blue truck came up the trail and stopped nearby. Rona leaned out the window as she stopped the engine.

"That the last one?"

"For the moment," Dean said.

The back held four other animals, this one would fill it. They could hang the animals and dress and butcher the carcases back at camp, but the meat was much better if it was mostly bled out straight after death.

Boze tied the rope around the buck's hindlegs, throwing the free end over a branch and hauling it up off the ground. Dean cut the throat and they watched and waited, talking quietly as the dark, rich blood flowed onto the ground.

* * *

_**Highway 23, Tawas, Michigan**_

Alex stopped her truck in the farm yard, looking around the deserted buildings carefully. She picked up the shotgun lying on the seat next to her and nodded her readiness to Rufus, both slipping out from their respective sides and closing the doors. In the tray, Ben and Duncan and Alanna stood up, looking around as they jumped out, each carrying a gun.

The barn was huge, and they walked in warily, Alex and Rufus holding their weapons ready as they passed from the bright, sunshine-filled yard into the shadowy gloom of the building. Nothing moved, not even the rustles and scratchings of vermin sounded in the cavernous interior. Behind them, Duncan watched their rear.

She felt a wash of relief as she saw the sacks of feed, stacked up against the walls, and glanced at Rufus with a grin as they both saw the old Dodge flatbed parked at the end of the aisle.

"Take the hay this time?" Rufus walked down to the truck, opening the door and peering in.

"Yeah, Maurice and Risa brought another three cows from a farm down on the 23," Alex said, peering around at the work area to one side of the barn. "We'll need it for the winter."

The scavenging runs had continued and stepped up since the extra hunters and survivors had arrived. Slowly, the network of rooms in the cool basement of the camp were being filled, with staples like flour and sugar, with the carefully picked and wrapped fruits and root vegetables that would last them well into the winter, with dried and preserved and pickled fruit and vegetables that would keep their stomachs full and their bodies healthy until the spring brought fresh food again.

The truck started up, and Rufus leaned out the driver's side window, his teeth a white flash in the dim light. Alex, Ben, Duncan and Alanna moved to the side as he backed and stopped under the trap in the loft floor.

"Duncan, can you back the pickup in next to the feed sacks?" Alex looked over at the teenager, hiding a smile as the boy tried to mask his delight with a serious nod. These children, all of them, would grow up faster now, she thought suddenly. Become men and women at a much earlier age than if things had gone on as they had before the devil rose. She wasn't sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing. They seemed happy enough to take on the responsibilities they were given, their days spent in working with the adults, a lot of physical labour and practical examples of problem-solving.

"You want to take a look in the house, Alex?" Rufus broke through her thoughts, and she looked at him, nodding quickly and following him as he walked out of the barn.

At Chitaqua, the cabins had all been cleaned out, furniture scrounged for them, beds and tables and chairs mostly. Father Michael had completed the alterations to the cabin he'd claimed. The larger main room had a low dais at one end, opposite the front door, and from the elementary school in Tawas, Maurice and Tim had brought up a dozen single desks that were pushed against the walls when the priest held his small service on Sunday mornings.

She hadn't been surprised to see the turnout at the little makeshift church. People needed some sense of a greater good, a greater purpose, in time of severe adversity, and Father Michael was a good orator, a caring and compassionate man who thought carefully about the lessons he was teaching them. She had been surprised to see Bobby there, in clean clothes with his grizzled ginger hair slicked back with water and combed smooth. But perhaps the hunter had his own reasons for needing comforting words.

Boze, Maurice, Tim, Rufus and Franklin each had a cabin to themselves. Rona and Risa had decided to stay out of the main house and share one. Chuck and Castiel, the sad-faced man that Rufus had told her was actually an angel, had cabins of their own. She wasn't sure if she believed Rufus' assertion about the man, but she hadn't been able to come up with a solid reason for him to lie about it either.

Debbie had moved from the house with her daughter, Mary, when she and Tim became involved, the first overt relationship in the camp, other than Dean and Lisa. It wasn't so surprising, she thought to herself, walking up the stairs of the farmhouse, her eyes scanning the shadows, watching for danger as well as searching for the things they needed. Debbie was less than a month from her due date, and the instinctive need for a protector had probably speeded the relationship along. Tim was a good man, and a loyal one, and he would take care of them.

Her mouth lifted in a slight smile as she thought of the conversation with Dean about the possible repercussions of relationships within the camp structure. It was working alright, leaving the responsibility with the people themselves. She'd known it would. Rules were necessary for some things, but she'd found mostly that people were sensible if they were left to themselves to work out the consequences. Arbitrary enforcement wouldn't have worked.

The linen closet was full. They would take all of it, Alex thought, moving onto the bathroom. She was pleased to see that the cupboards in there were also well stocked, with soap and shampoo and cleaners, toilet paper, towels and a good range of standard, off-the-shelf medicinal supplies, as well as a couple of bottles of prescription medication – one bottle of codeine-heavy painkillers, and a bottle of nitroglycerine tablets for angina. She put both in the pocket of her jacket.

The main bedroom's closet held a good collection of luggage and she pulled out the empty cases, filling them with the linen, bathroom supplies and towels, dragging them down the stairs and leaving them on the wide porch to be collected before they left. Each bedroom was stripped, and she looked at the beds carefully, mentally earmarking the place for a return trip if they needed more. They were well-made and the mattresses all looked pretty new and in good shape.

Walking down the stairs, she nodded to Rufus as she passed him in the hallway. He was lugging a boxful of books down to the porch. While they needed books on the practical side of surviving, she'd been glad to get the support of Bobby, Father Michael and Rufus on the benefits of having a good collection of fiction as well. With little else in the way of simple entertainment, and the historical value of revealing a world that had been and was now gone, the imperative to collect as many works of fiction as they could find was a given now on every scrounge trip, and the big house in camp was slowly being filled with a range of novels and plays and poetry, of every genre and for every age group. Children's books and the school texts they found from time to time had helped Debbie with her teaching and most of the adults didn't mind taking a turn at story-time, reading from the selection to a circle of wide-eyed children in the evenings.

In the kitchen, the cupboards and pantry had, of course, been stripped. Alex opened the door to the basement, switching on her flashlight and shifting the shotgun to the other hand as she walked down the wooden steps.

Later, she thought that the smell should have alerted her. A dryish, sweetish smell that shouldn't have been there, in the cool, slightly moist air of the cellar. But at the time, she'd been thinking of croaties, not even knowing about the other monsters that might have found the end of the world to their liking.

At the bottom of the steps she stopped, swinging the beam of light around, seeing the big wooden barrels lined up along one stone-built wall. She walked to them, lifting the tight-fitting wooden lids, and seeing fine sand filled to the top, and she put her gun down to dig through the sand, feeling the smooth, round shapes of apples, buried deeper.

There was a scuff behind her, and she turned, expecting to see Rufus, or one of the kids. The red-rimmed eyes that stared into hers, from a pouched and wrinkled grey-tinged face shocked her into a frozen stillness, taking her breath from her lungs.

The thing's arm swung toward her and it was blind reflex that brought her own arm up, taking the impact of the blow as she thrust the flashlight towards its face. It staggered back a little and Alex heard another sound, her head snapping around to see a second shadowy creature moving out from under the stairs.

"RUFUS!" she screamed, and there was a low chuckle in front of her.

"Mine," the thing said softly, lunging at her. Alex didn't feel the blow from the other side, her vision blacking out when the length of timber hit the back of her skull.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Nodding to the guards at the gate as they drove in, Dean looked along both sides of the perimeter fence automatically. The reinforcements they'd made were significant, the twelve-foot boundary now fixed into place over a six-foot bank, the fence leaning out slightly, a pit dug along the inner line of the fence that was filled with salt and pitch, able to be lit as a secondary wall of flame in the case of more determined attackers.

After talking to Bobby, Alex had suggested that the railway line that was stockpiled at the freight docks on Lake Huron might be a useful boundary. He wasn't sure why he hadn't thought of that himself, or why Rufus or Bobby or Boze hadn't either. Fresh viewpoint Bobby'd said dryly and he guessed that was true. They'd never really defended a place before, and the nearest comparison was Samuel Colt's pentacle in Wyoming, a project that never would've entered his mind to emulate.

The iron tracks were laid and buried in a rough circle around the compound now, though, the truck lifting slightly as it ran over them, giving him a sense of security about the safety of the people inside. There were a lot of things that could cross that boundary, but at least some would be unable to, and anything that helped his odds was welcome.

Rona pulled up in front of the barn and they got out, stepping to one side as she backed up to the chain haul that had been hung from the centre rafter. When she stopped, Boze climbed into the tray, hooking the first of the deer onto the chain and lifting it out of the truck. Maurice and Franklin walked up, looking over the carcasses and pulling out their skinning knives and Dean grinned at them, turning away and leaving them to it.

He looked down the track, seeing the white pickup and a much larger flatbed, both parked down by the main house, both loaded heavily with another load scavenged from the local farms. They'd been moving out lately, but were still able to get what they needed within a conservative twenty mile radius. He started walking down to the house.

As he came up to the truck, Rufus came down the porch steps, giving him a wide grin. "Bobby bet me you wouldn't actually kill a deer," the older man said, looking up toward the barn. "Hope you proved him wrong."

Dean's mouth lifted at one side. "Hope you weren't betting paper money, Rufus, 'cos he lost that bet."

"Nah, stakes are whiskey now." Rufus slid a couple of cases from the top of the pile on the truck and turned to carry them into the house. "He loses any more bets and I'll have enough to last a couple of years, at the least."

Dean reached up, taking another two cases from the back and followed him in. "What'd you get on this run?"

"Hay, feed, linen, books, about the usual," Rufus grunted as he hauled the luggage up the stairs.

"You take the kids?"

"Yeah, handled themselves pretty well," Rufus allowed, dumping the cases by the walk-in linen closet on the second floor and leaning against the wall as he watched Dean do the same.

"Where's Alex?" Dean dropped the bags and turned back for the stairs.

"Not sure, kitchen, I think," Rufus said, following him. "She said she found a load of apples and root vegetables in the cellar, but we didn't have room for 'em on this trip, so she was going to organise another trip for tomorrow."

Dean nodded and turned to the right at the bottom of the stairs, leaving Rufus in the hall and walking into the kitchen. Renee and Lisa were at the sink and counter respectively, Lisa looking up as he came in, smiling at him.

"Hey, how'd the hunting go?"

"Got a load of venison for the freezers," he said. "Hope you know how to cook it."

"We'll figure it out," she said dryly, hearing Renee's chuckle behind her.

"Alex come in here?" he asked, looking around the kitchen. Lisa nodded, gesturing to the basement door.

"She's down there," she said, watching him go to the door and open it. "What were you after?"

He paused at the door, looking back at her. "Just an update."

She looked down at the vegetables she was cutting up and he went down the stairs, following the trail of lights to the big store-rooms.

Alex was looking at the shelves when he walked in. She glanced at him and nodded, looking back at the sacks of flour and sugar, corn and oats and barley.

"Good haul today," he said, walking to her. She nodded again, keeping her gaze on the shelves.

"We got five buck. Maurice and Frank are dressing them now."

"Good," she said, turning her head to look up at him, and he felt a faint jolt of unease at the cool distance in her eyes. "Was there something you wanted?"

He hesitated slightly at the dismissive tone in her voice. "Anything wrong?"

"No, of course not," she said, turning and walking out of the room. "Just busy."

"Right." He followed her out and down the hall to the stairs, wondering if that's what it was. "Rufus said you wanted to make another run out to that farm?"

"Yes, there's quite a lot of food still there, in the basement," she said, stopping at the foot of the stairs, her gaze cutting away from him again to look up the staircase. "It would be a waste to leave it."

"Alright," he agreed readily. "Tomorrow morning?"

"That would be fine."

He watched her turn away and walk up the stairs ahead of him, the back of his neck prickling slightly as he slowly walked up after her. Coming into the kitchen, he closed the door to the basement behind him.

"Anything wrong with Alex?" he asked Lisa, walking to lean on the end of the counter.

"Not that I noticed," Lisa said, looking at him curiously. "Why?"

He shook his head. It wasn't anything he could put his finger on, a coldness, a lack of expression that hadn't seemed like her at all.

Renee turned around to look at him, her face showing the same unease he felt. "I thought there was something wrong too, but she said she was fine," she said. "I mean, we all tend to go through patches where it kind of hits home what's really happened, you know?"

He nodded, a little reluctantly. "Yeah."

Walking out of the kitchen, he headed for Bobby's room. Something about the explanation didn't ring true to him. He hadn't noticed any moodiness in her, in the time they'd been here, but he thought, he didn't know her that well, and it was possible.

* * *

_**Six hours later**_

"You want a hand?" Dean looked at Ben as he staggered up the stairs with a load of firewood. Ben peered around the logs in his arms and nodded eagerly. "Just another load and I'm done."

Picking up an armful from the stack along the stone wall under the porch, Dean followed him inside and dumped the logs into the big boxes that sat on either side of the fireplace in the living room.

Ben looked up at him. "Thanks."

"No problem," Dean said, smiling slightly. The kid was easy to please. "How'd you go with the target practice today?"

"Good – I think," Ben said, looking around the room. "I beat Duncan's score!"

"That's not too shabby."

"And I was the fastest at field-stripping and reloading," Ben stated, grinning at him. "But I've had more practice than the others."

"Yeah, well, never hurts to be as fast as you can be with that," he remarked, sitting in the armchair next to the fire as Ben dropped to the floor in front of him. "Who'd you have for sparring today?"

Ben's face screwed up slightly. "Frank."

Dean smothered a laugh. "What's the face for? He's a good teacher."

"Yeah, but he hits hard," Ben said, reflexively rubbing his ribs. "And I'm not getting it right. Not like with the guns. I can't move the right way."

Looking at him, Dean was suddenly reminded of Sam, at that age. All arms and legs and not much idea of how they went together. "How 'bout we do a little one-on-one tomorrow, see if it helps?"

Ben's eyes lit up. "That'd be great!"

"Yeah, well, depending on the supply runs and everything else, sometime in the afternoon."

The boy nodded. They both looked up as Alex walked past them, not even glancing at them. Dean saw Ben's face fall slightly.

"What?"

Ben shook his head. "I think I did something wrong, today, when we went to the farm, but I don't know what," he confided in a low voice, his gaze dropping.

"Why would you think that?" Dean frowned, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees as he looked down at Ben.

"Alex wasn't – she seemed mad when we'd finished, and she didn't talk to anyone on the way home," Ben said slowly. "Usually – I mean, most times, if we deserve it, she tells everyone what a good job they've done, and how much it helps and she's nice, you know?"

Dean nodded, lifting his head to look at the woman as she stopped by the long windows, twitching the curtain aside to look out.

"But today, she didn't, so I guess I did something that wasn't right," Ben continued.

"Maybe not, Ben," Dean said, looking back at him. "I don't think you did anything wrong. Maybe she's just –," he closed his mouth on what he'd been about to say, hunting for a substitute. "- uh, just in a bad mood today, for some reason?"

Ben looked up at him, brow wrinkling up a little. "She's never in a bad mood, Dean."

"Huh."

He ran his hand over his jaw, wondering about that. Everyone had an off day from time to time. He hadn't noticed himself, but he wasn't around that much. He thought back to the way she'd been in the store-room.

In the last couple of months, since Boze had brought his survivors in, he'd been talking to her a lot. She kept the records for the camp, along with Chuck and Father Michael, how much they had, how much they needed, and he'd begun rely on her objective practicality when he needed to make decisions that involved everyone. Talking to her was – had always been –easy. She wasn't emotional, didn't take things personally, had a kind of a long-range view of things, like getting the pharmaceuticals they would need somewhere down the line. And she seemed to enjoy it, had seemed to enjoy talking about it with him. But not today.

He looked back to the window, brows drawing together when he saw that she'd disappeared again.

"You got homework?" Dean looked at Ben again. The boy nodded reluctantly.

"Every night," he admitted.

"Better get on with it if you want to go out with us tomorrow then," Dean said, hiding a smile at the brightening of Ben's expression. He watched him get up and join the other kids, and stood up, looking around the long room.

Had something happened? Something he should probably know about? He wasn't sure who to ask. So far as he'd been able to tell, Renee was about the closest person to Alex and she had no idea. He could try talking to her again, see if something was wrong. The last thing he needed now was a problem between the people here.

He went out through the dining room and into the kitchen, nodding at the teenagers as they finished the washing up and drying. They hadn't seen her since before dinner and he nodded impatiently, turning around and heading for the stairs. As he walked along the hall to her bedroom, he wondered at his persistence, dismissing the thought almost immediately as he knocked on the closed door. There was no response and he pushed it open. The room was empty.

At the bottom of the stairs, he stood indecisively, looking around. Maybe she'd gone to see Father Michael, if she did have a problem, he thought. He walked to the front door and out onto the porch. A faint movement in the shadows along the driveway caught his eye and turned to look, focussing as he saw it again.

Alex was forgotten as he walked silently down the porch steps and along the drive, following the movement from shadow to shadow. It had to be someone from here, he thought uneasily, but the behaviour was slightly too furtive for an evening stroll through the woods. He cut through the trees and behind the cabins when the drive curved to follow the contour of the hill and saw the figure clearly as she came out of the darkness under the trees near the gate.

_Alex._

_Doing what_, he wondered? He looked up the slope to the guard tower that sat by the gate. Tim and Ty were on duty there and after a moment, he saw the big spotlight come on and swing around to pin her in the circle of light.

"Just me, you guys!" she called out, waving.

"What's up?" Tim leaned over the high platform edge and looked down at her.

"Just found something that you guys need to see," she said, reaching the ladder and starting to climb.

_Bullshit_, Dean thought, and he rocketed down the slope toward the tower, gun in his hand.

"Freeze!" he yelled as he crossed the gravel drive, the gun aimed at her. "Tim, keep the light on her!"

"What?"

Alex stopped half-way up the ladder, hooking one hand through the thick timber rung and holding both up to show they were empty.

"Dean, it's Alex," she said, looking down at him.

"Come down, slow," he said as he reached the bottom of the ladder. She turned away from him, both hands on the rung and moved her foot, then she was scurrying higher, and the first shot he fired went slightly low, splintering the rung below her as she scrambled onto the flat floor. He jumped back as Tim came cartwheeling off the edge of the platform, landing in a sprawled heap beside him.

"Ty, it's not Alex!" he shouted, his warning almost drowned by Alex's scream.

"NOW!"

On the platform, Ty struggled to keep her hand from hitting the entry button on the remote motor that controlled the gate, her fingernails slashing across his face and down his neck.

Dean spun around and saw a number of figures running toward the gate, indistinct in the darkness, clothing fluttering around them. His eyes narrowed, then the spotlight swung around, pushed as Ty's back hit it. The road on the other side of the gate was lit up completely and the figures running for the gate were all too obvious.

"Fuck- GHOULS!" Dean shouted, running for the ladder as he realised what must have happened. "Ty, she's a ghoul!"

He shoved the gun in his jacket pocket and climbed fast, ducking as he reached the top and Alex turned to him, her arm swinging out and the long nails tearing across his cheekbone. The gun was in his hand and he fired, four shots in quick succession into her head.

Not enough to kill, but it had slowed her down, he thought as he heaved himself over the edge of the platform and pulled out his knife. Ty was on his hands and knees, crouching over the controls to the gate, his face and neck a bloodied mess. Dean grabbed the ghoul, swinging her around and driving the knife-tip into her neck, pushing out to sever arteries and windpipe and dragging it back again as he thumped a knee onto her back and forced her to the floor of the platform. The knife was slick with blood as he hacked his way through the spinal column. Her head fell to the ground, bouncing several times before it came to rest against the gate, and he dropped the blade, pushing the body off the platform with his foot, and reached out for the big machine gun that was placed on the outside of the platform.

The staccato roar of the gun filled the night. Distantly he heard shouts from the camp. Closer, he saw the ghouls hesitating and turning to run back into the darkness as the bullets stitched across their backs, two of them losing their heads with the force of the shots.

When they'd disappeared in the darkness, he released the trigger, turning to look at Ty as the road was filled with bootsteps and calls.

"What the fuck?" Rufus said from the ground and Dean looked down, his face drawn in the backwash of the spotlight.

"Rufus! Get a car, right fucking now!"

Rufus nodded, turning from Tim and leaving him to Renee and Boze and Rona, racing down the hill again.

Dean looked at Ty. "You okay?"

"All just scratches, man," Ty said tiredly, the adrenalin that had flooded his system beginning to leech out. "Stings like hell but nothing worse."

"Rona, Ty's up here, needs some attention," Dean said as he swung over the edge of the platform and started down the ladder. "Boze, you armed?"

"Yes, boss," Boze said, looking up at him. "What was it?"

"Ghouls," Dean snapped, looking around at the people standing at the base of the platform. "One of them must've gotten Alex at that farm, because that wasn't her that came back with everyone else."

"Shit," Boze said, his stomach turning slightly at what it meant.

"Maurice, you and Rona take tower duty now," Dean said abruptly, seeing the headlights of the four-wheel drive coming up from the camp. "Everyone else, get Ty and Tim back to base, patched up and everyone stays inside unless the alarm goes. Locked and loaded until we're back, got it?"

The group nodded and murmured assent, drawing back off the road as Rufus hit the brakes in front of the gate.

"Boze, you, me and Rufus," Dean said going to the driver's side as Rufus shifted across inside the car. Boze nodded, opening the rear door and getting in.

As his door shut, the gate rumbled open, the spotlight showing both sides and down the track, Maurice closing it again as soon as the rear bumper had gone through.

* * *

_**Highway 23, Tawas, Michigan**_

The farm was dark and Dean wondered if the ghouls had gotten back, or were still on their way. He turned off the headlights and engine and coasted down the long, mild slope of the driveway, touching the brake as the ground flattened out between the house and the massive barn.

He turned to look at Rufus. "House or barn?"

"She was only alone in the house, in the basement," Rufus said shortly, pulling out his machete and easing his door open. Behind him, Boze also held a long machete blade, the bare edge glinting slightly as he slipped from the car. Dean looked at the house for a moment, then gestured to Rufus to take the front, turning and hearing Boze following him as they ran around to the back.

The back door was unlocked and he pushed it gently open, keeping to the walls of the kitchen to limit the chance of a floorboard creaking as he crossed the room to the basement door. He felt a single tap on his shoulder and opened the door, moving out of the light from the bare bulb over the stairs and hurrying down the thick wooden steps, his flashlight on and lined up along the barrel of his gun.

The long, deep room seemed to be empty at first; it wasn't until they'd started looking hard at the walls that they found the handle-less door, set under the staircase. He pulled it open and gagged, huffing out the foul air as it hit him from the dark interior.

The flashlight beam showed a couple of tables in the centre of the room, gleaming a little from the edges of the tools and knives that were embedded in piles of offal and rank, decomposing meat. Dean's mouth thinned and he walked deeper into the room, playing the beam over every square inch of wall and floor, feeling Boze behind him, his flashlight covering the opposite wall.

The attack was still a surprise.

He heard Boze's grunt and spun around, his flashlight lighting up a small, grey-skinned, red-eyed creature in torn garments, one hand still gripping the long carving knife it'd shoved into Boze's back, lips peeling back to reveal blackened, rotted teeth and fresh blood dripping from its chin.

The gun shots were deafening in the closed space, and he kept firing as the creature hit the ground, stopping only when the magazine ran out. Dropping the gun, his fingers curled tight around the hilt of the machete and he swung it in a short downward arc across the ghoul's neck, felt it bite deeply into the packed earth of the room's floor, watching the head separate cleanly and roll aside.

"You okay?" he asked Boze, turning and pulling the knife out, the big man lying on his side, sweat beading on his face and neck.

"Think so, glanced off the ribs and went in over them, not into my guts," Boze said shakily. "Can you see?"

Dean turned him over a little, lifting his jacket and shirt and nodding. "Yeah."

"Is Alex here?"

"I don't know," Dean said, looking at the slow-spreading blood stain on the man's back.

"Dean?" Rufus' voice called out faintly.

"In here," Dean called out, hearing him come down the stairs, his flashlight flicking over them.

"Get Boze up to the car, he got knifed," he said, getting to his feet and driving the machete blade into the surface of one of the tables. He leaned over, pulling Boze's arm around his neck.

"Where's Alex?" Rufus hurried over, gripping the hunter's other arm and helping to heave him upright.

"I don't know. Get him out of here." Dean turned away from them, picking up his flashlight and jerking the machete from the table top. He played the light slowly over the rest of the room as he heard them walk out. What he'd thought was a wall, wasn't, he realised, his eyes differentiating the line of the corner as he got closer. He shifted to the other side, machete held up as he hurried around it.

Two more tables took up the space, one covered in a grey heap of meat, the noxious fumes from it almost impossible to breathe through. He pulled up the collar of his t-shirt in an attempt to shut it out as he shone the light on the other table.

The ghoul impersonating her had taken her clothes, and her skin was covered in what seemed like hundreds of small cuts, each one bleeding, trickles and threads and pools of blood, dripping down onto the table and the earth below.

One arm hung over the edge of the table, the inside of the forearm cut deeply, and blood ran down over the wrist and palm to fall into a bowl that had been set beneath it.

The bowl was almost half-full and he closed his eyes, dragging in a deep breath. Not more than a couple of quarts then, he thought, lifting the arm up as he put the machete down on the table, and struggled out of his jacket and shirt, an involuntary shiver rippling through him as the cold air hit him through his tee shirt. He pressed his fingertips against the side of her neck, feeling a thready beat there after a moment, his expression hardening as he took his shirt and ripped the sleeves from it.

He wadded up one sleeve tightly, pressing the edges of the cut close together and holding them closed with the padded material as he wound the other sleeve around her forearm and knotted off. Lifting one eyelid, he shone the flashlight beam across her eye, seeing the pupil enlarged and non-responsive. Unconscious, and just as well, he decided, sliding an arm around her back to hold her up as he manoeuvred his jacket around her, pushing her limp arms through the sleeves and zipping up the front impatiently. He had to get her out of here.

There was a thud outside the room and Dean glanced over his shoulder.

"Rufus, get the car close to the back door."

Silence answered him and he turned around, lowering Alex to the table top again as the three ghouls came around the corner. _Larry, Curly and Mo_, he thought irreverently.

"You've got to be kidding me," he muttered, looking at them tiredly, his hand finding and curling the hilt of the machete and lifting it from the table.

The ghouls came at him together and he stepped to one side, both hands around the hilt as he swept the blade in a long, whickering curve that sent Larry's head flying out to hit the wall. Mo slammed into his side, knocking him against the second table, his arm disappearing to the elbow in the putrid flesh that covered it, the feel and smell bringing the contents of his stomach up to the back of his throat.

He twisted hard against the sharp fingernails that were digging through his tee shirt into his side, elbowing the creature in the face, a faint surge of satisfaction accompanying the feel of the bones breaking under the blow, and he dropped to the floor as its grip slid loose, rolling under the table and slashing at the legs of Curly, who'd come around the end. As it fell to the floor beside him, he lifted the blade and brought it down hard, the edge severing the neck and the head rolling away.

Mo leapt onto his back as he tried to stand, hooked fingers driving into his throat. Ducking sharply down, Dean tried to tip the tenacious ghoul off, spinning on one knee and slamming it into the edge of the table when he saw a pair of blood-spattered boots come into his field of vision and heard the distinctive whistle of Rufus' serrated machete above him. The ghoul dropped off and he shuddered as he straightened up, fingertips reaching gingerly for the stinging, bleeding cuts at the side of his neck.

"Nice timing," he said, coughing.

"Couldn't let you have all the fun," Rufus quipped sourly, looking around. His expression hardened as he saw Alex lying on the table.

"Let's get out of here," Dean wiped the blade on the remains of his shirt and sheathed it, going back to the table.

"She alright?" Rufus asked softly beside him. Dean slid his arm under her back again, lifting her off the table and nodding.

"I think so," he said, jerking his head toward the stairs. He hoped so anyway, he amended silently to himself.

He followed Rufus out of the room, and up the stairs, looking at Boze who was sitting up in the backseat, his head tipped back.

"Boze, front seat, man," he said, as Rufus opened the rear door. The hunter opened his eyes and looked them, nodding wearily as he pushed the door open and climbed out. Getting awkwardly into the rear, Dean shifted along the seat until Rufus could close the door behind him. He grabbed the blanket from the floor and unfolded it, wrapping it around Alex as much as possible.

Rufus got in the driver's side and started the car, flicking a glance at the man beside him as he pulled out. Boze was leaning back in the seat, his eyes closed.

"You had the three kids and Alex, Rufus?" Dean asked quietly from the back as they pulled out the farm gate.

"Yeah," Rufus answered, running his hand over his head. "I couldn't be with all of them at the same time."

Dean nodded. "Yeah, well, from now on, two hunters go with the teams."

"Dean, we're stretched thin as it is –"

"Two hunters, Rufus," Dean repeated harshly, his voice deepening. "We've been thinking of croaties and demons but they're not the only things out there, and none of these people know anything about the rest."

Rufus let out his breath softly. "Alright."

Dean looked out the window for a moment, the muscle twitching at the point of his jaw. They were stretched thin, not enough of them to do the jobs that needed to be done. It didn't matter. The people who were with them were civilians. They had no idea. He looked down at the woman he was holding. He'd never even mentioned the fucking monsters to her. Hadn't even thought of it. And the hunters needed these people as much as the people needed them, more maybe. He couldn't go do his job, go find his brother, if he had no base, no food, no stockpile of ammunition.

Her head had turned to one side, and he saw the dark, sticky matting of her hair at the back, lifting his hand to touch there lightly. His fingers came away red, and he closed his eyes, leaning against the glass of the window beside him.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The gate rolled open and Rufus drove through and down to the house. Father Michael, Bobby, Lisa and Renee were waiting at the top of the porch steps for them, clearing a path when Dean carried Alex in, Rufus, supporting Boze, following him.

"What've we got?" Bobby asked as he walked past him.

"Boze caught a blade in the back, along the outside of the ribs, we think," Dean said tersely, over his shoulder. "Alex's got a head wound, a deep cut in the forearm, a lot of superficial cuts and she lost somewhere between two and three quarts of blood, I think."

Renee nodded. "Rufus, take Boze to the kitchen. Lisa, get Debbie to help you dress his back . Dean, bring Alex upstairs. Father, can you make up a saline solution? We'll use the bags we got from the Frenech place?"

"Is it safe to bring her in here?" Lisa asked worriedly as she watched Dean walk to the stairs. "I mean, if she was bitten or whatever?"

Bobby glanced at her expressionlessly. "Ghouls eat people, they don't turn 'em."

As he followed Renee up the stairs, Dean was aware that his shirt was sticky and wet. He couldn't see if the makeshift bandage he'd put on was coming loose or was soaked through, but he knew the wetness against his skin was blood. He waited as Renee pulled back the covers of Alex's bed and laid down two thicknesses of towels over the sheet and mattress, then laid Alex on top of them. Stepping back, he looked down at himself, his tee shirt red from collarbone to waist and the inside of his arms smeared with blood.

Renee glanced at him, her brows shooting up. "Is that yours or hers?"

"Hers, mostly," he said. "I think the bandage worked loose."

"Well, you're still on your feet, so just help me get the blanket and jacket off and then you can go clean up, alright?" she said shortly and he nodded, moving around to the other side of the bed and lifting Alex as Renee pulled the edge of the blanket out, drawing it away. She unzipped the jacket, and Dean caught a glimpse of her mouth compressing into a thin line as she pulled the lapels away and saw the cuts and blood.

"I don't want to know anything about what did this, do I?" she asked him, her voice tight as she lifted Alex's arm free of the sleeve. Dean looked at her as he did the same on the other side.

"No." He took the collar of the jacket and eased it away, lowering her back to the towels. "But I think you're going to have to learn, about a few things, anyway."

Father Michael came in, two hospital bags of saline solution, a makeshift pole to hang them from and a coil of plastic hose with a cannula at the end in his hands, Lisa following him into the room, carrying a bowl of warm, salted water, a pile of gauze pads and a stack of sterile dressings.

Renee nodded to them, moving out of the way so that the priest could hang the bag, and taking in Lisa's expression as she stared at Dean. She gestured to Dean.

"Go and make sure you're not bleeding out anywhere either."

She undid the bandage as he backed to the door, taking the gauze and wiping the blood from around the cut.

"Do we have butterfly closures or do we need to stitch this?"

* * *

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he winced slightly as Lisa dabbed alcohol over the scrapes and puncture wounds in his neck and shoulders, covering the wounds in antibiotic powder and taping on dressings over the worst of them.

"How's Boze?" he asked her as she gathered up the packets and cotton balls she'd used.

"Bobby cleaned it up and dressed the cut," she said quietly, putting them in the trash can near the door. "He said it skated over the ribs."

"Yeah," Dean straightened up a little, carefully stretching the muscles and waiting for the pain to tell him the story. There wasn't much and he picked up the clean shirt from the bed beside him and pulled it on. The shower had done most of the work, he thought. He shunted aside the memory of the pale red water running down the drain at his feet. "He'll still be out of action for a while."

"I guess so," Lisa said, walking back to sit beside him. "But we're not badly off, we can relax for a week, can't we?"

He rubbed a finger over his eye, feeling a slight crust on his lashes. "No. We can't."

"Why?" She moved closer, slipping her arm around him.

"Because nothing else is taking time off, Lise," he said, curbing the irritation he could feel growing. "We have to make sure that we have enough food for these people, that we can protect them, that we can find out what's going on in the rest of the country –" He cut himself off and got off the bed, walking aimlessly across the room.

"But I thought we had plenty of everything?"

"Yeah, well we don't," he said, turning around. "And with Alex …"

Lisa frowned as he trailed off. "What?"

He shrugged. "She lost a lot of blood, maybe too much."

"We'll manage, Dean, until she's recovered," she said. "I can take over checking our supplies –"

"And you're gonna milk the cows? Feed them? Doctor them?" he asked, aware that his tone had an edge to it.

"No, but she's been teaching Duncan and Michelle as well. And Alice and Mary to milk the goats, I'm sure we'll manage to survive," she said defensively.

"Yeah," he said, giving up. He didn't want to articulate all the things he was worried about anyway. Not to her.

"You should rest, get some sleep," she said, immediately conciliatory as she saw his shoulders drop. He nodded but picked up a clean plaid shirt and pulled it over his tee shirt.

"Yeah, in a little while," he told her, turning for the door. "I need to, uh, see about clearing out the rest of the ghouls with Rufus first."

He felt her gaze on him as he left. He was very tired and talking to Rufus could've easily waited until morning, but he admitted reluctantly to himself, he didn't want to stay. Didn't want to have to make the effort to be reassuring or feel her need pressed up against him.

* * *

_**One week later.**_

Alex winced as she pulled off her clothes, feeling the scabs catch and tug as she moved. Most of them would soften up in the shower and drop off and start growing again but she wasn't going another day without a shower and she'd just have to live with the discomfort.

Renee had told she'd been unconscious for three days, what the ex-nurse thought was probably a hairline fracture at the back of her skull, and they hadn't been sure she was even going to make it, between the head wound and the loss of blood. She could have told her that she had a tough constitution and her body had handled worse in the past. But that would have invited questions that she didn't want to answer so she'd smiled instead.

The hot water beat down with sufficient pressure to actually massage her as she stood under it, just letting it flow over her for a few minutes. Everything stung in the water but it was a minor pain and she ignored it as her muscles warmed and relaxed beneath the steady spray. Picking up the soap, she luxuriated in the process of getting clean again, scrubbing the thin line of blood and dirt that had been beneath her fingernails since she'd been attacked, and washing the faint but pervasive scent of blood and decomposition finally from her hair.

Aside from the recurring nightmares, she thought she was healing up pretty fast.

Getting dressed in clean clothes, she waited patiently as Renee changed the dressing on her arm and parted her hair, looking at the crusting scab that had formed over the split in her scalp, nodding in relief as she was an okay to get up. She walked slowly downstairs, feeling faintly disoriented, as if she'd been away from home for a long time. It was a peculiar feeling because she hadn't realised that the camp felt like home for one thing; and she'd really only been out of it for a few days for another.

Her gaze took in the state of the house, still reasonably clean, logs stacked beside the fire which was blazing in the hearth in the living room, warming the air right through the house. The kitchen and dining room were tidy after the morning meals, bowls of vegetables sat ready for preparation later, Michelle standing at the counter, grinning at her with a smudge of flour across her nose.

"Glad to see you on your feet," the voluptuous blonde said cheerfully.

"Glad to be on my feet," Alex agreed, looking around distractedly. "Isn't Alanna supposed to be helping you?"

"Yeah, but Dean roped her into another scavenging run this morning."

"Another –? How many has he done?" Alex asked. They'd been on a schedule, to give the hunters time to do other things.

"Three a day," Michelle said, adding another handful of flour to the dough she was kneading. "He was worried about the supplies."

"But Lisa or Renee could've told him –"

"Oh yeah, they did, at least I heard Renee going over the situation with him yesterday." She looked up from the board as the heels of her hands pressed out the mix. "He changed a few things around."

"Like what?"

"Everyone gets tested now, when they come back in from a run or a job," Michelle said, frowning slightly as she thought back over the hunter's pronouncements of the last few days. "Two hunters go with the teams. Um … he did a run down to Saginaw, picked up a load of medical stuff …"

"Oh." Alex looked away, wondering what had happened that he'd decided to put supplies at the top of his priorities. "Do you know where all that stuff went?"

"It's in the first supply room, in the basement," Michelle confirmed, adding another swipe of flour to her cheek inadvertently.

"Okay, thanks," Alex said, turning for the basement.

* * *

The trucks pulled up at the gate and everyone got out, standing in a loose line as Maurice walked along them, and Rona stood on the platform behind the M60. Holy water, salt, silver and iron. The tests were simple and fast and after three days of them, becoming normal. Dean got back into the pickup, glancing at Rufus as he got in the other side.

"Where did Bobby say those warehouses were?"

"Brighton, Lansing, Romeo and Chelsea," Rufus said, looking at him. "Why?"

"Just wondering if it's worth taking a shot at them," Dean said, thumb tapping against the wheel as they drove slowly through the gate and down the drive. "If they were locked up, there might still be a lot of food there."

Rufus shook his head. "And that close to Detroit, a hell of a lot of demons and croaties and god knows what else, Dean."

"Yeah."

"We're stockpiling," Rufus added, frowning as he looked at the younger man's profile. "This load just about fills the store-rooms under the house and the barn is full – we'll have seed enough to replant in the spring."

Dean tipped his head back, stretching out the tense muscles of shoulder and neck. "Yeah, I guess."

"You've kept these people fed and safe, man," Rufus added, pressing the point as the truck bounced over the iron under the ground. "And they're learning how to do it for themselves. We got other things we need to be getting on with, you know."

"I know."

Pulling up in front of the house, Dean turned off the engine and pulled on the brake. Rufus was right, mostly, he thought. What was here now was a big improvement on what they'd started with and he was pretty sure he'd covered everything, thought of everything important anyway. In the back of his mind, the sense of time ticking away continued, every second, but they couldn't go any faster than they were.

He got out and grabbed the topmost box from the tray, lifting it clear and resettling it against his chest as he walked around the truck and up the stairs. The list Alex had given Bobby was just about cleared. The trip to Saginaw had netted them at least some of what she'd thought of, although they hadn't been able to find some things. There was time for another fast trip, maybe over to Grand Rapids, before December.

Carrying the box down the basement stairs, he turned into the store-room he'd temporarily designated for all the stuff he didn't know where to store and stopped as he saw Alex crouched beside a pile of boxes against the wall.

"Didn't think you'd be up for a couple more days," he said, forcing a casual tone as he set the box on the long table against the wall.

Alex turned around and straightened up, a slight smile lifting one side of her mouth wryly as she looked at him. "Moving around helps the stiffness more than rest."

He was relieved to see the smile, hear the wry tone. That's what the ghoul hadn't had, he thought vaguely, that self-deprecating air. She looked directly at him, and her gaze was open and friendly again.

"Yeah it does," he agreed, glancing at the boxes filling the room. "We did a few more runs and I, uh, didn't know where you wanted these to go," he added, by way of explanation for the unpacked stores.

"What did you manage to get?" Alex turned back to the box she'd been looking through. "Michelle said you went down to Saginaw?"

He nodded, walking over to her. "Didn't get everything you wanted, but we got a few things. The drugs, most of them anyway. Some text books from the college. The, uh, sewing stuff …" He gestured around the boxes. "There's time for another shot at it, maybe Grand Rapids."

Looking down at the boxes, Alex thought about the timing, the weather, their requirements. "That's pretty tight, isn't it?"

"Yeah, it will be," he said, watching the expressions flicker across her face. "But just a couple of us going, we can move a lot faster."

"You need someone who knows what what's needed," she said slowly. "I can give you a list, of course, but I can't list out every possible substitute if you can't find the exact same thing."

"How is it you know this stuff, exactly?" he asked her curiously, leaning against the side of the shelf beside him.

"Oh, I spent a fair amount of time in hospitals," she said evasively. "Got a good working knowledge of a few things."

He waited for her to elaborate on that, but she didn't.

"Dean!"

Renee's voice drifted down the basement stairs.

"Yeah?" he called back, going to the door.

"Bobby says get up here," Renee yelled and he glanced back at Alex, shrugging as he walked out and back up the stairs, heading for Bobby's office.

* * *

"What?"

"Got company, coming from town," Bobby said brusquely, turning from the radio. "About eight vehicles, heading here."

Dean nodded and turned on his heel, walking fast out through the hall and down the porch steps. "Rufus, Frank, Risa, c'mon, got company coming."

They dropped their loads and ran to the cars, getting their weapons and following him up the curving drive to the gates.

Maurice lowered the binoculars, looking down as he saw Dean climbing the ladder toward him.

"I don't think it's an attack," he said, passing the glasses to Dean as he reached the platform.

Holding the binoculars, Dean adjusted the focus slightly and the lead truck leapt into view. The flatbed bounced over the washouts and potholes as it came around the last bend on the road, slowing to make the turn down to the camp and he saw the driver clearly.

"Okay," he said softly. "It's okay, I know the driver of that truck."

"But we still test them?" Maurice asked worriedly, taking the binoculars as Dean handed them back.

"Hell, yeah," Dean said, going to the ladder and climbing down as Rufus, Risa and Frank split to cover both sides of the gates. "We test everyone."

"Who is it?" Rufus looked at him as he jumped down the last six feet, and walked to the gate.

Dean lifted a hand as the truck came to stop in front of the gate. "It's Ellen."

He walked through as the gate rolled open, hearing Maurice behind him but his attention fixed on the maple-haired woman who climbed down from the truck cab.

"God, boy, you are hard to find," Ellen said as he walked up to her. He wasn't expecting the ferocious bear hug he got, holding his rifle out and wrapping his free arm around her as it became apparent she wasn't going to let go until he did.

"Tried to stay inconspicuous," he said, ducking his head self-consciously as she released him and stepped back. "It's good to see you."

The passenger door clunked shut and Dean turned to see Jo walk around the front of the truck.

"Hey, Jo," he said, glancing at Maurice as she walked around the truck front to stand beside Ellen. "This is Maurice."

Ellen smiled warmly at the hunter and Dean realised that introductions to most of the hunters here would be unnecessary. Jo smiled tightly at the man as she shook his head. Not familiar with him, he realised belatedly.

"You tell your people to get out of the cars?" He gestured down the line. "We're testing for everything before anyone gets in."

Ellen nodded and opened the driver's door, grabbing the mike from the radio in the dash and giving the order.

As the line of vehicles disgorged their passengers, Dean looked at the two women, seeing that both had had it hard. Never fat, both were skinny now, their bones jutting against their skin, their clothing threadbare and filthy, shadows like bruises around their eyes.

"You had a hard trip?" he asked Jo, looking down at her as Ellen walked down the line with Maurice, talking to her people. The girl he'd seen last in Colorado had gone, he realised as she looked up at him. Her eyes were hard and wary, all the teenage sass burned out of her.

"Yeah, it wasn't fun," she said, her voice holding an edge. She'd folded her arms across her chest, and he thought the gesture looked defensive.

"You look like you've got a good set up here?"

He nodded as Risa came up to them, her hands full. Jo glanced at her, taking in the items she was carrying.

"Alright, what do we have to do?"

"Holy water, salt, silver and iron, just the usual," Dean said, glancing at Risa who passed Jo the bottle of holy water. "We had a problem with ghouls and we're not taking that chance again."

Jo swigged from the bottle and passed it back, licked the salt Dean spilled on her hand and held out her arm as Risa laid the blades of the silver and iron knives across her skin. There was no reaction to the elements, and Dean didn't expect any but he felt a small thread of relief anyway. He watched Maurice coming back up the line of vehicles, those who'd been tested getting back into them.

Lifting a brow at Ellen as she stopped next to them, he said, "Lot of people."

She nodded, her face tightening slightly. "There were more, we got hit by demons in Nebraska and lost a lot."

"Sorry," he said, glancing at Jo as she dropped her gaze to the ground. "These survivors?"

"A few are," Ellen said, turning to check that everyone was back in their cars and trucks. "Most of them were slaves."

"Slaves?" Dean frowned at her.

"I'll explain it when we're in, Dean," Ellen said, looking back to him. "It's a hell of a world out there now."

He nodded and turned away as Maurice gave a short blast on a whistle. Ellen looked quizzically at Dean as she opened her driver's door and put a foot onto the step of the cab.

"Follow the drive down to the main building, you'll see it. Stop there," he told her, his gaze flicking up to Rona. The gate rolled open and he walked through, stopping beside the tower to watch the vehicles pass by one by one.

All of the people they'd brought were thin to the point of emaciation, he thought grimly. All looked like they'd been through hell. Counting them roughly as they passed, he realised he'd have to talk to Alex about the supplies for winter again.

Ellen and Jo had brought another twenty people with them.


	4. Chapter 4 Parameters

**Chapter 4 Parameters**

* * *

_**Camp Chiaqua, Michigan**_

Bobby's office had been a parlour, of sorts, with a small, tiled fireplace and a graceful bay window. Now, it was wall-to-wall bookshelves, with a couple of armchairs in front of the fire, a sofa under the window and a big desk, covered in books, papers, notes, journals, two monitors, keyboards and mice, filing baskets and a couple of glass jars filled with the black fine-point biros he preferred to use for his notes.

Ellen, Jo and Rufus sat on the sofa. Tim, his fractured arm held in a sling to keep it still, sat in one armchair, Maurice in the other. Bobby was behind his desk and Cas, Rona, Chuck, and Dean leaned against the shelves, desk and the backs of the armchairs.

Bobby looked around the room at the faces of the men and women there. All hard, all experienced hunters. He sighed. Hadn't seen so many of them all together since the roadhouse, he thought tiredly. And whenever hunters were gathered in force, it wasn't a sign of anything good.

The door opened and Boze walked in, ushering Alex ahead of him. Bobby glanced at Dean and saw his slight nod. He waited until they found somewhere to stand, and looked at Ellen.

"Alright, Ellen, tell us."

"I can give you the background, but you'll need to speak to Hank. He was there," Ellen said, looking around at them. "We picked up maybe ten people and were heading through Kansas when we ran into them – over two hundred people, all walking, chained together –" Her lips thinned and her gaze cut away for a moment. When she looked back, her face was smooth and expressionless, whatever memory she'd had of that day shoved somewhere else.

"There were twenty guards there, spread out along the lines of people, and we thought they were all possessed, at first. Turns out they weren't, just doing the jobs they'd been given –"

"Given by who?" Bobby asked, a deep frown drawing the bushy, ginger brows together.

"The devil, I guess," Ellen said, looking at him. "We got one of the human guards alive, and he told us that there were a lot of people who were working for the demons – oh yeah, they knew that there were demons controlling some people – but they weren't, themselves, possessed." She looked down at her hands, folded tightly in her lap. "It took a while to get that straight, but Hank was being moved from Wichita down to Atlanta when we got there, and he said that the structure had been set up for a while. The demons have been looking for people like him, engineers, electricians, tradesmen and women, teachers, nurses, technical people … they're presented with a choice, depending on their skills. Very skilled personnel can walk free, if they agree to do the work. If not, they're possessed. The less-skilled but still useful people are branded and held in camps to work."

She looked at her daughter. "Jo, hon, go get Hank."

Jo nodded and got up, walking to the door.

Dean looked at Ellen. "Alright, fucking unbelievable, but alright. What happened to the rest of the people you found?"

"We'd killed the guards and freed everyone, and we were looking for vehicles, enough to get everyone loaded and moving when we were attacked."

"By what?" Bobby leaned on the desk, looking at her.

"Demons – actually, soldiers mostly, possessed by demons," Ellen said with a slight shrug. "They were in Army vehicles, armoured and armed, and they were dressed in uniforms. I think, at first, a lot of the people thought they _were_ the Army, come to save us," she said, shaking her head. "But when they opened fire, that kind of torpedoed that idea."

"We lost half of them there on the road," she continued, rubbing her fingertips hard over her forehead. "Got the rest under shelter and found a back way out, but there just weren't enough vehicles to bring them all, and there was another attack while we were trying to get out. They had two tanks and … well, the rest didn't make it."

Dean stared at her. Lucifer had been working overtime, he thought disbelievingly. Tapping into Sam's memories of their father's knowledge, looking for people to get the cities – or some of them at least – up and running again. There would be a lot of people who would look the other way, ignoring the reality of their boss and co-workers if it meant going back to the way things had been, even in a small way, he realised slowly. Hitting the bases for vehicles, equipment and weapons was another good idea. A private army would keep the balance of power in his favour, enable him to take people by force … sonofabitch had really had it all planned out.

And he thought wearily, it explained why more than half of the people Ellen and Jo had brought in were kids.

They'd come into the house when the small convoy had stopped, eight adults and twelve kids ranging from a four-year old girl to a thirteen-year old boy; all of them thin, filthy, their hair matted and their clothing torn and worn out and he'd watched them sit down at the table and look at the food on it in complete astonishment, as if it was a mirage. Renee and Alex had been careful about the quantities they'd served out, but there'd been plenty and Michelle, Debbie and Renee had led them upstairs after they'd eaten, to wash, and find them clean, new clothes. Lisa and Father Michael had checked their eyes and teeth when they'd come down, apparently the first things to show malnutrition. The adults, with the exception of Hank, had been collected on the road, none of them branded or chained.

He looked around as the door opened and a tall, thin young man walked in, Jo following him and closing the door behind her.

"Hank, these are the hunters I was telling you about," Ellen stood up. "That's Bobby Singer, Rufus Turner, Dean Winchester, Boze Greenwood, Tim Janklow, Rona Marsh, Maurice Sweeney …" She gestured at the people sitting around the room. Hank nodded to them as his gaze moved from face to face.

"Just tell them what you told us," Ellen shifted to the arm of the sofa as Hank walked over to her.

He looked around uncomfortably, and sat down on the edge of the sofa, chewing on the corner of his lip. "I – uh – I was in Topeka, when the virus started," he said, looking down for a moment. "I mean, everyone's got the same story, right? No idea what was going on? Anyway, after a week, I ran out of food and figured I better get moving, find other people – real people, I mean – and food, or I was going to die, just sitting in my apartment, like a rabbit too scared to leave its burrow."

"I was about halfway to Hays when they came up the road behind me, and I stopped, waving my arms. Dumb, but I thought that the infected people were the only danger, didn't realise that there'd be other … things … that were worse." He looked at his arm and unbuttoned the cuff, rolling up the sleeve slowly. "I didn't know they weren't people, not at first. They said they were rescuing everyone, and I – I just climbed on board. At Hays they picked up another six or seven people, and then we turned around and went back to Wichita."

"When we got there, they stopped being friendly. We drove in and we could see people, a lot of people, with leg-chains, you know, like they have in jails and they told us that they were prisoners, that they'd been let out to help clean up the city." He shook his head. "I mean, I think most of us were uneasy, by the explanation, you know, but not one person asked about it, not one of us. We got to a big park, and a lot of it had been burned out, right down to the ground, and they said, get out. Then they pulled out the guns, and even then, I didn't get what was going on. I looked around and most of the people they'd picked up were like me, with this look – just a blank look on their faces. But a few, maybe four or five, they got it straight away. Two of them broke, started running and they were gunned down before they'd made the edge of the park, and a bunch of people with the chains on came right away to pick up the bodies and carry them away. The others, they hung back, together, and when the first people started getting processed, they attacked a guard."

Watching him, Dean saw his eyes darken with the memory, a shiver run through him.

"They grabbed him and his eyes turned black, jet black, from corner to corner," Hank said slowly. He glanced up at Ellen. "Ellen, uh told me, that was a demon possessing a human, but back then I didn't know what it was. Only that I was looking at evil like I'd never seen before. Like I'd never even imagined before."

"It didn't matter that there were three men on this thing. It tossed them like they were nothing, just like they were dolls and it shot them straight away, before they could get to their feet."

"The rest of us, we just stayed put, just shuffled forward in our lines. At least until they brought out the irons." Hank lifted his arm and Dean saw the brand on the top of the forearm, burned into the skin and muscle, the outline still a deep red, thickened with scar tissue. The design was familiar but he couldn't remember where he'd seen it before.

"What is that?" he asked, looking at Bobby.

Bobby scowled. "Sigil of Lucifer. His Enochian sigil."

Hank looked from one to the other, waiting, and Dean shrugged.

"There was a guy, at the front, he had the black eyes and he laughed at everything. He took down all our details and he – sorted – the people into three groups. I don't know what happened to the other two groups. He asked me if I wanted to work for them, voluntarily and I didn't say anything, hell, I couldn't say anything. I guess he figured that for a no. The next thing he pressed that iron into my arm and I just about dropped from the pain. They did another one on the other arm and that's all I remember of that." He rolled up the other sleeve, and a smaller brand, equally deep and raw-looking marked the skin over the big muscle of the forearm. SLW-15631.

"When I came to, I was on a bus, my arms throbbing like a bitch and my legs chained at the ankle. I had to do about a weeks' labour, moving bodies, mostly, and burning them. Then they put me on a team downtown, working on repairing and rebuilding the buildings that had been destroyed."

"How long did you do that for?" Bobby asked him.

"Two months, I think," Hank said. "A lot of them had to be demolished, they couldn't be rebuilt. They were cleaned out and levelled and left."

"And the power was going?" Dean looked at him.

Hank nodded. "Power was on when we got there. Substation had been fixed and the generators were going. But I overhead the demons saying that only five cities were going to be turned back on. The rest weren't worth the effort."

"Why'd they have you on the road?" Rufus asked, his eyes hooded and dark. Hank looked up at him, spreading his hands helplessly.

"They just said that Wichita was finished, there was work to do in Atlanta," he said diffidently. "A lot of the demons were griping about that, but the key people, the ones who'd actually figured out how to get the power back and what to do about the bodies and the sanitation and turned the water on, that kind of stuff, they all stayed."

Dean glanced at Ellen who widened her eyes slightly at him. Did it mean Lucifer – Sam – was at Atlanta? Or was the devil just being methodical?

"Do you know what the other cities were?" Bobby asked, writing fast on his notebook.

"There was a lot of talk, but I don't know how accurate it was. The most consistently named cities were Atlanta, Austin, Las Vegas and Boulder, in addition to Wichita. That makes sense, mostly. Aside from Atlanta, they're not really huge towns and getting them back into order wouldn't be so hard. I don't know about Vegas, though –"

"Proximity to military bases," Franklin growled from the corner. "There's a helluva lot of ordnance in Nevada."

Rufus nodded, looking at Dean. "I'd agree with that."

Dean looked at Bobby. "Perfect."

"Yeah, well, we better figure out who to send out to pick up our own stash of military gear, if we're going to be facing a war," Bobby said, scratching his brow.

Alex looked at him. "You might want to send out anyone you can spare to destroy what you can't use too."

Tim frowned as he looked at her. "Why?"

Bobby sighed deeply. "'Cause, Lucifer won't just be looking for engineers and power technicians, idjit. He's gonna be looking for pilots, an' anyone who can give him an unbeatable tactical advantage over folks like us who think we can fight him."

Dean ran a hand over his jaw. Bobby was right. Airpower would wipe out any resistance, more efficiently and more effectively than any kind of ground attack. They didn't have enough people to handle that kind of initiative.

* * *

"Can we fit them all in?" Dean asked Alex as they walked down the hall.

"If the guys don't mind doubling up in the cabins for a while. We've put bunk beds into two of the bedrooms upstairs, and all the younger children will be in those, the older ones are sharing as well," she said, hurrying a little to keep up with his longer stride. "We'll need to build more housing, but not right away. After the winter should be fine."

"What about the food?"

"Well, the menu might not be too varied, but with more game from the forest, I think we'll be able to go without rationing. We won't have milk, or butter or eggs, in fact we're pretty looking at running out of those now."

"Is that a problem?" He looked down at her, slowing down as he realised she was struggling to keep up with him. "I mean, for the kids?"

"We put up a lot of cheese, and we've got a reasonable store of salted butter." Alex shrugged. "We'll ration that and make sure that the youngest get the most of it. There's calcium in a lot of vegetables as well, so I don't think we'll see rickets or rotten teeth."

"Is there anything you have to do here for the next few days?"

Alex stopped. "Why?"

"We could get to Grand Rapids and back," he said, looking down the hall. "Get what you wanted, or look for it at least. Depending on what we have to avoid, it'll take about five-six hours to drive there, give us a bit more than two days of searching."

"We don't need to search that hard, I know where to find most of the stuff. I used to live there," she said, frowning slightly. "But I can go with Rufus, or Maurice –"

Dean shook his head. "No, we'll take my car, it'll be faster. And if this stuff is important, I'm not sending anyone else out to get it." He lifted an eyebrow. "So, is there anything you need be here for?"

"No."

"We'll leave just before sun-up." He waited for her nod and turned away, heading for the stairs. He'd already worked it out with Bobby and Rufus, both men would be running the show for the time he'd be gone. And Tim, Boze and Ty should have a bit more mobility by the time they got back. Bobby'd been right. They needed to think more proactively about this, both for offence and defence.

* * *

The candle flame burned steadily on the nightstand, casting a small pool of golden light around it, enough to see by. His eyes half-closed, Dean could see the gleams outlining Lisa's hair and cheekbone as he slid into her, her face screwing up a little as she lifted her hips to drive him deeper. He ducked his head, his mouth trailing up the soft skin of her neck, knowing the sensitive spots, feeling her shiver as he kissed along them.

She started to move faster, thrusting against her hips against his and he slowed down, shifting his weight slightly to pin her down. It was an unspoken contest between them and he couldn't remember when it had started, only that it been a part of their sex life for the last few weeks, her trying to force him into losing control, and him resisting it. He wasn't sure what it was about, but his instinctive reaction was to counter. He shifted his position slightly again, and slid his hand down between them, seeing her eyes fly open and her lips part.

Over the last eight months, he'd slowly come to realise that in spite having a wide variety of partners in his life, he'd never had just one over any period of time. And the whole ballgame was different, different rules, different expectations, different outcomes. They hadn't talked about it and he wondered if she wasn't satisfied with what they did, if it was leaving her wanting. It wasn't exactly that it had become boring, but the initial highs, the unknown things, he guessed, had faded a bit.

He felt her getting close and started to move faster, long, deep strokes that caught at her breath until she was hitching in small sucked gasps. The deeper tremors that dragged at him, building his need for release, were still well within his control. Abruptly her arms tightened around his shoulders, nails driving into his skin and she was bucking up against him and he smiled inwardly, pounding through tightly swollen spasming muscles that rippled up him and clenched around him. Then he let go.

He wrapped his arm around her as he rolled over, slipping out, Lisa rolling over as well, one arm across his chest and her head nestled into the hollow of his shoulder. He could feel her breathing slow down and settle back to normal.

"How are the new people settling in?" he asked her, tilting his head to look down.

"Fine, I think," Lisa said slowly. "Renee and Michelle sorted out the sleeping arrangements and we've got enough linen and clothing for everyone. One of the guys is a mechanic, so that'll help. And I think Alex said the older guy was a teacher, high school, maybe."

"Good." He nodded slightly. "We're going to need a bigger schoolhouse."

She smiled, her cheek lifting against his skin. "Yeah, nine of the new ones are in grade school."

"Tell Father Michael that if he can get Hank to help him draw up some plans, we'll get the timber from the factory before mid-December."

Lisa looked up him. "You don't want to tell him yourself?"

"I'll be heading out for a few days, first thing," he said. "If he wants it before Christmas, then they'll have to start doing something before I get back."

"Where are you going?" Lisa lifted herself onto her elbow, looking at him, her expression a mix of accusation and concern.

"Over to Grand Rapids."

"Why?"

"See if they have the things we need that we haven't got yet," he answered shortly. "I told Alex we'd do a run before the weather set in and this'll be the last chance."

"Who are you taking with you?"

"Just be me and Alex," he said with a shrug. "It'll be quicker."

"Just you and Alex," she repeated, an edge to her voice. "Why her?"

"Because she knows what we need and where to find it," he said, looking at her more closely. "It's not a weekend getaway, Lise."

"And what if the camp's attacked while you're road-tripping across the state?" she asked tightly.

"Then Bobby and Rufus and everyone else will deal with it," he replied mildly. "Are you worried about the camp, or about me?"

Lisa looked away, the long curtain of her hair hiding her face.

He let the silence stretch out a moment or two, then ran his hand down her arm. "Seriously? You don't trust me?"

"You spend a lot of time with her anyway," she said quietly.

"Yeah, I spend a lot of time with Bobby and Boze as well, for the same reasons, don't tell me you're worried about them too?" he asked, trying to lighten the conversation.

"Doesn't matter," she said stiffly.

For a moment he hesitated, not entirely sure he was understanding the problem. Was this a trust issue, or a jealousy thing?

"It matters to me if you don't trust me," he said slowly, shifting up to lean back against the pillow as he looked at her. "But if this is about something else, I'd like to know."

"No," Lisa said abruptly. "I trust you."

"Then what's the problem?"

She looked down at the covers, and he could see the tension in her back.

"Lise, whatever it is, don't you think it'll help to deal with it?" he asked, a little reluctantly, aware that he was well out of his comfort zone with this stuff. It hadn't really occurred to him before that he was in a relationship, a partnership, of sorts anyway. And that it was his responsibility to at least hold up his end of it.

"The problem is … I don't really know how you feel, Dean," she said finally, sounding as unwilling to voice the words as he was to hear them. "I thought, it seemed like we had more than just sharing a bed, you know?"

He made a noncommittal noise in his throat and she looked at him warily. "Is that all it is? Because if it is, just tell me now, so I don't have to keep wondering."

"Honestly? I don't know what exactly this is," he said, pulling in a deep breath. "This is new territory for me. And it's happening in a situation where I don't have time to think about it or worry about it, it's just too far down the list of priorities."

"Right."

"If you want me to leave, just tell me, I'll go," he said, looking at the set of her jaw. "I know this probably isn't what you want, but it's the best I can do right now."

She drew her legs up, leaning her forehead on her knees. "I don't want you to go."

He closed his eyes, tipping his head back against the bed head. "Then you're going to have to accept that this is all I've got to give."

She didn't respond and he turned his head to look at her. "I'm not looking around for anyone else, if that's what you're worried about, but there's just no way I can do or be any more to you. Not now."

The silence stretched out between them, and he closed his eyes again, not knowing if he should get up and find somewhere else to get the few hours' sleep he needed before he had to go, or if he was supposed to just wait, until she was ready to say something, or move or show some sign that a resolution had been reached.

He realised uneasily that he was wishing he hadn't taken the comfort she'd offered, hadn't given in to the need to feel someone else's warmth and closeness. He had no idea of how he felt about her, other than it was comfortable, and easy and up till tonight, it hadn't demanded that much from him. He didn't have the time or the … whatever it was that the relationship needed, that she obviously needed. He was in the middle of a fucking war, for god's sake, as far as he'd ever been from getting Sam free of the devil, and the latest news hadn't improved any of it.

He felt her movement as the mattress dipped very slightly and looked at her as she lifted her head.

"You're right," she said softly. "It's – it's not fair to expect anything now."

Dean wasn't sure if the feeling that trickled through him was relief or disappointment. It would've been easier, he guessed, if she'd told him to go. He had the feeling that this conversation wasn't over, it'd just been shelved, to some future date when it would rise again, like some bloated, drowned corpse. He didn't think that what he say then would any different to what he'd just told her.

"If this makes it too hard –" he started and her eyes met his as she cut him off.

"No. I don't want to end this, Dean."

He saw her eyes narrow slightly as a thought hit her. "Do you?"

"I don't know," he said, shrugging slightly. "I don't want to have to worry that I'm hurting you. I don't want to feel like there's something I'm not doing right, something that you're missing out on because I can't give it to you." His mouth twisted up to one side. "There are other guys here, Lisa. Guys that can probably make you happier than I can."

"I don't want them." She looked defiantly at him and he let out his breath slowly. "I want you."

"Like this?" He gestured vaguely. "Nothing else?"

"Yeah," she said, unfolding herself and moving tentatively toward him. He shifted back down the pillows until his head was resting on them and held out his arm and she pressed herself against his side. "Yeah, like this, if I can't have anything else."

Turning his head, he blew out the candle beside them, welcoming the darkness that enveloped the room. It wasn't going to improve, he wanted to tell her. It wasn't going to all magically come right again and give them – give him – as chance to explore being in a relationship. This, what was here right now, right here, was all there was ever going to be. But he had the feeling that deep down, Lisa already knew that.

* * *

Alex was waiting in the hall when he came down, carrying his boots in one hand, the gear bag, with a dozen weapons, boxes of ammunition, bottles of holy water and canisters of salt weighing it down, in the other. He followed her out through the front door onto the porch and pulled it closed behind him, stopping at the top of the steps to pull on and lace up his boots, glancing at her as she looked south to the lake.

She was wearing jeans, boots, a turtle-neck undershirt, thick flannel over-shirt and a heavy Army coat, padded and covered in pockets, a pair of gloves tucked in one, looking warm enough for the freezing cold darkness. Over her shoulder was a small Army day pack, not full, heavy at the bottom.

"You get a gun and some ammo?" he asked quietly as he got up and picked up the bag.

She nodded, and turned to go down the stairs as he started down them. He'd moved the black car up to the driveway the night before, and he opened the passenger door for her, closing it and going around to the driver's side, slinging the bag onto the back seat.

"Gun in the pack, or your jacket?"

"Pack. Loaded, safety's on," she said, looking through the icy windscreen as he started the engine and flipped the de-icer on.

"Well, shift it to your jacket," he told her. "You might not have all that much time to get it out."

The windscreen cleared reluctantly and he shifted into gear, letting the car rumble slowly up the driveway to the gate. Alex opened her pack and pulled out the blued steel Beretta 9mm automatic she'd been practicing with, double-checked the safety and slid it into the outside pocket of her jacket.

"See you in a few," Dean said to Rona as she waved down to him and opened the gate.

"Stay alive," Rona responded, watching the woods to either of the side of the road as the black car drove through, and closing the gate after them.

"You get any sleep?" Dean flicked a glance at Alex as he turned toward town, the car lurching over the new potholes. In the faint light of the dash, her face looked pale, shadowed around her eyes.

"Yeah, just not much," she admitted. "I went through the street maps of the city, marked out all the places I'm pretty sure will have what we need. Do you think there'll be – anything – living there?"

"No clue," he said with a shrug. "We'll take the back way in but basically your guess is as good as mine."

She nodded again, her gaze on the road in front of them.

"What'd you think of Hank's story?" he asked, curiously. "I mean that people are working for the demons of their own free will."

Alex smiled as she heard the faint outrage in his voice. "Well, it wasn't much of a surprise."

"No? Fuck, I was surprised," he said, his bitterness more overt. _Surprised. Shocked. Angry_.

He felt her gaze turn to him. "You must know people who'd sell their souls to get their conveniences back?" she said. "I know I do – did."

There was a slight edge to her voice as she corrected herself and he wondered if there was a specific person she'd been thinking of.

"You think that's all it is?"

"Yeah, I don't think there are many in the general population who are genuinely evil," she said, the edge that had been along her words gone now, leaning back against the window. "But there are a lot who are lazy. Or want things the easy way, or what they think is the easy way. People who don't really care much about others. There always have been."

He thought of the people he'd met, in the towns and cities, in the quiet rural stretches, in the desert and mountains. He supposed there had been some who'd been that way inclined.

"You sound cynical."

"No, I have a lot of hope," she said. "But I try not to kid myself that it's all sunshine and rainbows, you know? People haven't changed that much since the coliseum days."

"Mmm."

"You're … you and the others; you're not really soldiers, are you?"

He smiled humourlessly. "No."

"What do you do then? I mean, that thing in the basement, how'd you know?" Her voice was a little unsteady and he wondered how well she was doing with getting past that experience.

"We're hunters," he said, glancing sideways at her. "Before all this, we hunted monsters, the things that live in the dark." He hesitated, partly at the novelty of saying it to someone who wasn't in the life, partly at the realisation that everyone, everyone left alive, was in the life now. "You know, all the monsters your parents told you weren't real."

"What was the –"

"Ghoul," he said. "Not very common, but they hunt in packs, and they can change themselves to look like their last victim, mimic them perfectly."

"Then how'd you know it wasn't me?" she asked, frowning slightly. "How'd you know I'd still be alive, not … eaten?"

"It looked like you, but it wasn't like you," he answered, a little uncomfortably, remembering the coldness in her eyes in the store room. "And I didn't."

"What else is out there?"

"Vampires. Werewolves. Shapeshifters," he said. "A lot of things that are hard to kill and are going to be competing for a much smaller population now."

"How do you kill them?" Alex asked. "I mean, is all the mythology right? Can you kill a vampire with a stake through the heart? Or a werewolf with a silver bullet?"

"What are you, a horror fan?"

"Yeah, well …" she admitted, a little unwillingly. Flicking a sideways look at her, he saw the embarrassed smile he'd heard in her voice.

"Vampires, no. The only way to kill them is decapitation. Most of the lore about them is totally wrong. But werewolves, yeah, a silver bullet to the heart will kill them. And most of the other shapeshifter types as well."

"Other shapeshifter types?"

"Shapeshifters themselves," he elaborated. "Skinwalkers, wraiths –"

"That's – stop. For a second. I might need to approach this is a bit slower," she said, shaking her head. "And you know all this, how?"

"Grew up with it."

"Your parents were hunters too?"

"Yeah." He felt his fingers tighten slightly on the wheel, not wanting to talk about that.

Alex heard his reluctance to discuss that in the single word.

"But these … monsters," she said slowly as another thing occurred to her. "They don't hunt together, they're more lone predators?"

"Yeah," he said, relaxing a little at the shift away from the subject of his family.

"So, the dangers of the croaties, and the demons, that's really a lot worse, isn't it?"

He nodded. "Yeah, especially if Sa-Lucifer's got them outfitting themselves from army bases."

"There's a National Guard base, that the military use too, at Battle Creek," Alex said. "I would guess they'd have a pretty good inventory there."

He turned to look at her, his mouth quirking up to one side. "You would, huh?"

"Well, yeah, it's only another thirty miles from Grand Rapids, and the army have mines that can be set off remotely, don't they?"

"They do," Dean said consideringly. _They do indeed_, he thought. Mine the roads and the forest between the town and the camp, claymores with concentric kill zones and they could wipe out a ground force coming for them without having to leave the camp or expose themselves at all.

"Not bad," he said, nodding.

"Well, you know, horror isn't the only thing I read."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Michigan**_

Ellen wandered through the house slowly, familiarising herself with the layout and the contents. Someone had done a good job of organising everything, she thought, looking through the store-rooms in the basement. Even with the extras she and Jo had brought along, there'd be enough to feed everyone. And keep them warm and clothed, with a bed to sleep in. She walked back up the stairs to the kitchen, closing the door behind her and going to the island counter when she saw that Renee was the only one there.

"It's Renee, isn't it? I'm Ellen," she said. "You've done a good job of getting this outfit on its feet," she said to the younger woman. Renee smiled as she kneaded the dough mix for the day's supply of bread.

"Oh, can't take credit for that," she said, gesturing with a floury hand. "Most of this was Alex's idea, and Dean and Bobby and Rufus have been organising the runs out to the farms for months now, bringing in everything they can find."

Ellen filed that information away without questioning it. When they'd pulled up out the front of the house, it'd been Dean's girlfriend who'd come out to welcome them, and she'd assumed that Lisa had been the driving force behind the camp and its smooth operation. She'd watched her daughter's mouth tighten slightly when that relationship had become apparent.

"How many of the people here can shoot a gun?" she asked now, passing Renee a clean, damp cloth as the dough was tipped back into the bowl to rise. "Or handle themselves in a fight?"

"Well, we all got target shooting 101," Renee said, moving the bowls one by one to the wide, sunny windowsill and covering them with cloths. "And when Tim and Boze and Maurice turned up, we started some – I don't know what you'd call it, like self-defence classes, really. Just learning a few basic moves to disable, or bring an opponent down."

"All the kids have both every day, before and after their school lessons," Renee continued, wiping down the counter and putting the ingredients away as she explained. "Dean and Rufus and Bobby have all been adamant that everyone knows how to load, shoot at close range, break down their weapons and at least understand what it feels like to hit someone, or get hit."

"Not a bad idea," Ellen offered.

Renee nodded. "I agree. We're vulnerable here, to some extent, because there's not many people who really know what they're doing. But we're working on it."

"So what's the structure?"

"Chain of command?" Renee turned from the sink to look at her. "Pretty simple. The hunters have final say over everything. I think that's really just Dean, Bobby and Rufus, but I'm not sure about that. Alex and Chuck and Father Michael manage most of the supplies, our staples and the fresh food and livestock, the school, the machinery on the place so that things keep running. Lisa and Michelle generally handle the older children, chores and so on. Debbie's teaching the younger ones. The rest of us have various responsibilities. I'm more or less in charge of cooking for everyone, and I used to be a nurse, before I got married, so injuries generally come my way."

"And the other areas of responsibility?"

"Cas and Alanna check the perimeter fence every day. Um … the hunters take shifts on the gate tower, it's manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Rufus organises the teams for the supply runs now. Bobby handles everything else, from checking the ammunition to spot-checking weapons. But he also spends a lot of time in some kind of research."

She turned to the coffee pot on the counter and reached for a couple of mugs. "Coffee?"

"Always." Ellen walked around to take the mug as Renee filled it.

"The boys, Ben and Duncan, have been doing the firewood for the main house. And both have been learning about the livestock for a few months now."

Ellen listened to her detailing the camp's daily routine and those responsible for seeing it run smoothly. It was a good set up, she thought. She'd have to go and have a long chat with Bobby about her and Jo's involvement, but she thought they, and the people they'd brought in, would be able to fit into the existing framework easily.

"So Alex, she's a hunter?" Ellen asked Renee. She'd never seen or heard of her, but that wasn't exactly unusual. Most hunters kept themselves to themselves, especially since the Wyoming gate had been opened.

"What?" Renee raised her brows quizzically. "No, she owns the camp. Well, she did, before the world crashed down around us. She bought it to turn into a camp for disadvantaged kids, a few months before the virus."

Ellen hid her surprise. The woman's inclusion in the meeting the previous evening had given her the impression that she was someone trusted, someone Bobby or Dean knew well.

"Do you know much about her?"

"Not really," Renee said, carrying her coffee to the clean, scrubbed table and sitting down. "I mean, we're friends, but she doesn't talk much about her past. She was married, she told me that. I don't know what happened to the husband. She said she was hospital for a while, last year, and it changed her outlook. When she saw this place, she bought it on impulse and started to fix it up."

"Lucky for us," Ellen commented mildly, finishing her coffee and setting the cup down.

"Yeah, very lucky. When we got here, there was food and beds and power. It was …," she paused, shaking her head a little. "It was like … coming home. She had everything we needed."

Ellen nodded. She'd felt the same way when they'd walked into the house and seen the dining table, loaded with food. Disbelief. Relief. Hope. All of the above.

"I'd better go talk to Bobby about getting jobs for the rest of us," she said, getting up. "Thanks, you helped fill in the gaps."

"Anytime," Renee smiled. "If you can cook, I'd sure appreciate a hand in that department."

"I can do a mean lasagne," Ellen acknowledged dryly.

"Ha! You're hired."

* * *

_**M-66 S, Michigan**_

"Where's the first stop?" Dean asked, slowing down to make the turns between the abandoned vehicles that littered the road. They hadn't seen any signs of life, other than wandering cows, sheep and the ubiquitous white-tails along the dried out verges and in the fields.

"Kessler, Inc.," Alex told him, looking at her street map. "It's on Woodworth Street in Northview. Be a right about three miles after we cross the river."

He nodded, watching everything, his mind on high alert. He wondered if he should've brought someone else, Maurice or Jo. Alex wasn't a bad shot, but she wasn't trained for a running fight, or even a standing one, and he suddenly realised that left it all to him.

"Get the pump action from the bag in the back," he said. "Just in case."

Turning in her seat, she leaned over the back and opened the bag, pulling out the gun and zipping the bag back up again. He heard her check the chamber and the load and the soft click of the safety as it went on again. At least she'd remembered everything, he thought.

It was an hour before midday, and the streets were empty, the town abandoned, by the look of it, not long after the virus outbreak. He couldn't see any bodies, either in the wrecks of the cars that lay scattered on the streets, or on the sidewalks and he wondered what that meant. Cannibal croaties or ghouls or citizens who'd all thoughtfully gone to their houses to die, or what?

"What are we looking for here?" he asked, making the right onto Woodworth and seeing the big sign for the factory building a block ahead.

"Surgical equipment," Alex answered tersely. The emptiness of the town was getting on her nerves.

"Is that a must-have?"

"Unless you like being sewn up with a straight needle or using a carving knife to dig out a bullet." She looked behind them, through the rear window, seeing the same emptiness and lack of life. "They do blood and saline bags, IVs, syringes and needles, a lot of stuff. We don't need huge quantities, but having the right stuff means a better chance of survival if someone's injured."

The loading dock was around the back of the building and he pulled around the corner slowly, watching for movement rather than shapes. He backed up to the dock, inside the hangar-sized bay and stopped the engine, leaning over the back of the seat to grab a couple of magazines for his .45 and the machete in its sheath.

"Give me the pump action." He looked at Alex and lifted a brow. "Ready?"

"Sure."

He opened his door, and was out, the door shut and locked, keys in his pocket, pump action held in one hand. On the other side of the car, Alex was slower, but just as smooth, the door locked and her 9mm in her hand as she looked around the shadows of the building.

They climbed the short, narrow flight of stairs to the freight area and Alex stopped and looked around, seeing the sections clearly sign-posted and heading into the first aisle between the walls of stacked, sealed boxes.

She found a rolling cart and started to walk fast down the corridors between the products ready for distribution, her eyes scanning the box labels as she passed. Sutures. Clamps. Scalpels. Syringes. Needles, of different gauges. IV tube. Cannulas. Box after box, none of them large, was packed onto the cart as she went. IV bags. Curved needles. Sterilised dressings. Burn dressings. Pure alcohol. Gloves. Masks. Swabs.

Five or six feet behind her, Dean watched the aisles, the barrel of the shotgun moving lightly from side to side. There was too much for a single trip, she thought unhappily, watching the boxes mount up on the cart. If they could lock the loading dock, they could come back, maybe after winter. None of the products here were perishable.

"Done," she said, pushing the cart back to the edge of the dock. Dean nodded, following her until they reached the stairs, then moving in front, unlocking the car as she levelled the handgun to cover him, her gaze moving slowly from side of the building to the other.

He unloaded the cart into the back seat and shut the door. "C'mon."

Five minutes later, they were driving toward the next location, Michigan State University, taking the small surface streets under the freeway as they drove along the river.

* * *

Standing in the quiet and undisturbed library, Dean watched Alex absently as she moved through the stacks, taking books from the shelves, filling the canvas bag they'd brought with them. The books would undoubtedly help, but they needed a doctor. He thought of the set up Hank had detailed in Wichita and wondered when they could hit the city. Not in the next few weeks, he thought sourly.

Moving down to through the levels of the huge university library, they took a combination of basic texts and advanced studies on engineering and construction, mechanics and veterinary science. Dean watched Alex stagger down the stairs, the bag digging into her shoulder, wincing inwardly at the sight. He didn't offer to take it from her. He needed both hands free.

"Is that all we're taking?" he asked as they crossed the sidewalk, glancing back at the library.

She nodded, easing the bag off her shoulder gratefully as he unlocked the car and opened the door. "It's enough for now. We'd need a truck to get everything."

"Where now?"

"Fenix Pharmaceuticals," she said, getting into the car.

* * *

It was full dark when they'd finished packing the boxes into the car and he was acutely aware of how easy they were to target, with the engine running and their flashlights moving around in the silent, dark city.

"We done here?"

"Yes, I think so," Alex said, squinting down at the list in her hands as he pulled out.

"So … Battle Creek?"

She nodded, looking around. "Are we safer to try that at night, or in the daylight?"

He'd been wondering that himself. They hadn't seen any life in Grand Rapids. But he'd sensed that there was. It was just keeping out of sight. There was enough room left in the back seat and trunk for a few cases of mines and some ammunition. Even if they were fast, working at nights with lights on would draw any attention to them that was out there.

"Daylight, I think. Lights at night are visible from a long way."

He drove slowly out of the city, finding smaller and smaller roads to bypass the rusting piles of cars that still filled the larger thoroughfares. Once they were clear of the houses, he headed south, pulling off the road after ten miles onto a long, gravel farm road and backing the car into a small clearing in the midst of a copse, back from the road.

"Wake me at midnight," he told her, pushing the shotgun across the seat and shifting along it slightly to lean back into the corner between the seat and door, his head resting against the window.

Alex watched his eyes close and picked up the shotgun, straightening in her seat to be able to see all around the car. She was warm enough now, she thought, but had the feeling by midnight the car would be an ice-box. There were a couple of blankets in the back, thrown over the boxes and bags that filled that seat and she leaned back, hooking them and pulling them across to the front seat, leaving them in a pile in the middle.

Brave new world, she thought with a certain amount of self-mockery, looking down at the gun in her hands. Vampires and ghouls, werewolves and demons, and basically everything she'd ever known, gone. Her neck felt stiff and sore, and she knew it was from the tension of the day, watching and listening and waiting, constantly alert for anything that might mean she would have to use the guns. As much as she'd liked the vicarious thrill of action and horror films and books, she was ready to admit that having it in real life was not so much fun. The few, fragmented memories she had of the farm basement and the creatures she'd glimpsed down there floated just beneath her consciousness. She was aware of them, aware of the constant frisson of fear they generated, keeping it down by will through the day. But the nightmares were hard to deal with, making her afraid sometimes to close her eyes and go to sleep. They got mixed in together with other things in her past and brought her to wakefulness, panting and soaked in sweat and feeling exhausted.

There was only one sliver of memory of her rescue, jolted close to consciousness with pain as he'd carried her to the car, she thought. Just a blink of his face, drawn and hard, blood crusted along three long scratches over one cheek. He was a conundrum, the man sleeping hunched up in the seat next to her. When she'd first seen him, she'd seen a hard-edged man, confident and intolerant of weakness and clearly prepared to do whatever was needed to secure the camp for the people he was leading. He'd broken that impression when he'd taken the bottle back from her, swallowing a mouthful with a one-sided smile.

She'd watched him with the others, after that, trying to see who he was. She still wasn't sure. He trusted only three of the people in camp completely, she thought. Bobby, Rufus and the angel, Cas. Everyone else, even the men he laughed and joked with, even the woman he slept with, seemed to her to be held at arm's length, with a slight wariness that made her wonder why he found it hard to trust them. He took on the overwhelming burden of responsibility for all the people living there, and she could see that he worried about that, about them, all the time, but that responsibility, that worry, chafed at him as well, holding him like a bond when she sensed he wanted to be doing something else, wanted to leave to do something else. But he never gave the slightest hint of what that something else was. She saw it only in contrast to the time and effort he gave to securing the camp, securing the safety of the people under his protection.

He was impatient with adults but relaxed and very tolerant with the children, another puzzle. He didn't seem like the type of man who would settle down and want a family of his own. He listened. That had surprised her a little at first, when she'd noticed it. He listened to everyone, didn't leap to conclusions, didn't make hard and fast decisions about the future until he'd heard others' opinions. And the decisions he made were carefully thought out. It conflicted with her impression of his impatience, that underlying desire to be somewhere else. Self-discipline, she thought absently, staring into the darkness that filled and surrounded the car. A lifetime of it.

The others, most of the others, were easy to read. The hunters were, as a general rule, pragmatists, unsentimental and in many ways, uninvolved with the civilians in their care, seeing a greater picture than just survival, she thought. The talk of the devil – of Lucifer – down in the south had created a surrealism that she wasn't sure how to process. Bobby had told her a little, Rufus a little more. The devil's rising and the demons he commanded walking the land, walking the world. The virus and how it was supposed to subdue mankind, for a next step of sieging Heaven. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, bringing War and Famine, Pestilence and Death to the world and a death match between two archangels to determine the fate of the world. Even for a lapsed Catholic, it was a lot to swallow. But difficult to deny when the evidence lay around them in abundance, the world as it had been gone and nothing was just a matter of survival now, because surviving to see the end of days wasn't such a palatable option either.

Rufus had grinned at her expression when he'd told her about bringing down War. Dean has the Horseman's ring, he'd said, ask him to show it to you. She hadn't.

She and the older hunter had done a lot of miles together over the past few months, up and down and across the county, looking for anything that the camp could use. Rufus was prickly and sardonic, but not with her. He'd filled her in on a lot of the background of the hunters.

"_I've seen a lot of shit, crazy, crazy shit, Alex," Rufus had said, driving along on yet another farm run. "But this was … harder to accept."_

_She'd looked at him. "Because of the religious aspect?"_

"_Yeah," he'd nodded. "We go along and kill demons and we don't think too much about the other side of that equation."_

"_Everything in nature, everything in life, has an opposite."_

"_Exactly," Rufus had said, slapping the wheel in frustration. "But it's easy to forget about it when you don't see it. And it's impossible to credit it when you do."_

"_You said Castiel was an angel?" She'd looked across at him questioningly._

"_He is," Rufus snorted. "You'd think that'd be enough proof, right?"_

"_Well, yeah."_

"_Wasn't until we saw War, saw what he did, turning those folks on each other, easy as pie, that I let myself believe that we were really in it. Signs and omens, they're a part and parcel of our lives, but those signs, those omens – hell, they're from fucking Revelations, you can't get any more biblical than that."_

"_If there's a devil and a Hell, then there must be a God and a Heaven," she'd mused, mostly to herself. He was right. It was hard to get your head around._

"_Mmmm … 'cept apparently God's AWOL and the angels aren't cute and fuzzy and here to help."_

_She'd shaken her head, not knowing what to say to that. "Well, you can't have everything."_

He'd said that Dean, and his brother, Sam, were in it up to their eyeballs. Some prophecy about the brothers that meant they were chosen for something. Dean had never mentioned a brother to her, and she wondered why, wondered if it had to do with that need to be gone, to be somewhere else, doing something else.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

"How the hell are we supposed to figure out what he's doing?" Ellen sat next to Bobby's desk, looking over the files he'd been compiling.

Bobby looked at Franklin, who shrugged. "We've got two options that are possible. We send in spies, and hope that they aren't killed before they can report back."

"And option two?" Ellen asked sourly.

"Take a trip down to Dallas, get the power back on, get NASA's networks running and plug into the military satellites to see it remotely."

"I thought you said they were possible."

"They are possible. They're also just extremely fucking hard to do," Franklin said.

"If he's getting the cities up again, he's planning on a longer-term schedule than we'd figured," Bobby said, looking at the files in front of him. "But we don't even know if he has that time. The arcs are hunting high and low for Dean."

"And if they find him?"

"According to Cas, we're looking at most of the planet being in a fairly unusable state by the time they're finished. That's if Michael wins," Bobby said dryly. "If Lucifer wins, who knows?"

"You make sure you give this to me straight, Bobby." Ellen looked at him, her mouth twisting down. "Don't want it sugar-coated."

Bobby smiled slightly. "That's what we're looking at."

"And this is all going to end up resting on Dean?"

"No, hopefully not," Rufus said from the armchair. "If we can figure a way to shut down what Lucifer's put into place, to get those slaves free, we could probably throw a good-sized wrench into the whole plan."

"A front assault on Atlanta?" Ellen turned to him. "That's what we're looking at?"

"On Wichita first. To take Atlanta we're going to need an army."

Leaning back in her chair, Ellen exhaled audibly. "In case you hadn't noticed, we don't have an army. They do."

"Well, we're gonna have to take it back from them."

* * *

_**Fort Custer, Battle Creek, Michigan**_

Dean twisted the last pair of wires together, glancing around as he put the mine back on the shelf.

"Ready."

The Impala was parked in the ordnance shed, engine running quietly, the trunk packed with mines and detonators, and several more cases of ammunition for the guns they carried, low down on its rear wheels with the weight. Alex stood on the other side of the car, turning slowly to watch the interior.

The scuff of a boot on the concrete was the only warning they had before the open doorway was filled with soldiers, carrying machine guns and rifles, their shadows reaching across the smooth concrete floor toward them in the early morning light.

Behind them, Dean could hear more movement, and he turned his head slightly, seeing another six men spreading out across the span of the building. He shifted his gaze to Alex. She was standing by the passenger door of the car, gun still pointing at the men who walked closer, her finger tight on the trigger. He couldn't see her face.

"Well, well," the man at the front of the group of soldiers said with a low chuckle. "If it isn't Dean Winchester – and friend. As I live and breathe. What a fucking coincidence!"


	5. Chapter 5 Midwinter

**Chapter 5 Midwinter**

* * *

_**Fort Custer, Battle Creek, Michigan**_

Demon.

_Naturally._

The soldier's eyes blinked, becoming a shiny black across the eyeball, and blinking back to the dark brown irises of the soldier.

"Been a while, Dean," the demon said conversationally, walking up to him. "How're those nightmares coming along?"

"Same old," he forced himself to answer casually. "See you boys have gone respectable, Army and everything?"

"So much easier to pick up the stragglers when they think it's the good ol' U.S. of A to the rescue, you know." The demon grinned widely. "Sammy's been looking for you, Dean, he's gonna be so pleased to see you when we take you in."

"You mean Lucifer, don't you?"

"All the same package now, Dean boy," it said, the wolfish grin stretching wider. "You know, Dean, I can't help but wonder how you fit in up here, after all those years of slicing and dicing, tearing them up and ripping them apart and drinking the pain and the blood as it flowed out of them?"

Dean swallowed. "Oh, I have my outlets, even up here," he said, backing away from the car as the demons got closer. The wireless detonator was in his pocket. He hoped, he was hoping that Alex would understand. The car was running. She only had to get in and drive out and he would be able to set off the mine and that would take care of all of them. He took another step back.

Alex stared at the tall soldier in front of her, looking at the flat black of the eyes. _This is it, this is what they've been talking about_, she thought, paralysed by the sight. She could hear the demon behind her, a part of her mind listening to the conversation, the other part staring blankly in front of her, wondering the what the hell she could do that wouldn't completely ruin any plan Dean had.

"I bet you do," the demon said, chuckling. "Oh, I bet you do!"

It looked at him, its expression becoming thoughtful. "You could join us, you know, Dean. I'm sure your brother would love to see you … alive, change of heart … on our side."

"I don't think so," Dean said slowly, quarter-turning as he took a half-step back, his right hand slipping out of sight behind him, out of view of the demons in front of him, and of the demons who were now to his left, behind him. The bone handle of Ruby's knife was under his fingertips. "I've already got a job."

"Saving the world?" The demon took a long stride up to him and he saw that only two demons were still in front of Alex, their attention fixed on him instead of her. "You have to know that's not going to work out this time."

Alex watched the gazes of the two demons near her shift past to the conversation between demon and man. The car was running. She only had to shock them, freeze them for a second to get past and into it. Her entire body felt stiff and unresponsive and she pulled in a long, slow, deep breath, feeling it loosen the muscles, relax the sinews as she let it out it again. _You can do this_, she told herself, hand curling tighter around the gun. _They're barely paying attention to you. Pull the trigger and you'll buy a few seconds and that's all you'll need. Just do it._

"Stranger things have happened," Dean said, his hand curving around the hilt.

"So they have," the demon acknowledged with a deep sigh. "You were raised from Hell, for example. Given what you'd been doing, if that wasn't strange, I don't know what is, but … not this time, buddy."

The demon jumped as the pump action fired, its head snapping around to see the salt and iron round hitting the demon closest to Alex. Dean yanked the knife from the sheath, his arm swinging low as he drove under the demon's gun and up into its heart from beneath the rib cage, his face suddenly illuminated by the red and gold boiling light that filled the soldier as the demon inside perished.

Alex dove into the car, sliding across the bench seat and releasing the handbrake, putting the car into gear, stamping her foot on the accelerator and swinging the wheel around tightly. The tyres screeched on the smooth concrete as the car did a donut across the floor, running over the second demon who'd been close to it, passenger side door swinging open wide as it came close to him.

"DEAN!"

He could barely hear her shriek over the high-pitched squealing of the tyres and the cannonade of gunfire that exploded around him, pulling the knife free and judging the distance as he ran for the car, his left hand in his pocket, feeling for the switch. He threw himself in through the open door as he found the switch and pressed it.

"GO! GO! GO!"

The mine detonated on the shelf, and the black car had barely cleared the big hangar-style sliding door when the rest of the contents of the shelf went up, a howling fusillade of fire and shrapnel.

"Just drive straight!" Dean yelled at her, looking back through the rear window as the fire and explosions detonated the rest of the ordnance the building had housed. He'd wired the whole lot, the plan being to prevent that weaponry from being used by anyone else, and as Alex pressed the accelerator down to the floor, the car leaping forward, heading south straight across the concrete apron and toward the road leading to the barracks, it went up, tier upon tier of fiery explosions sending a towering column of black smoke into the sky, the metal building ripped into pieces by the expanding forces inside of it.

"Fuck! That was awesome!"

Alex flicked a fast glance at him, astonished at the genuine little-boy delight that lit him up, his face painted in gold and red by the inferno behind them. She looked back at the road when she felt the push from the expanding air of the explosions, shoving against the car, the wheel shaking in her hands.

Dean turned to look at her, hunched over the wheel, her fingers tightly gripping it. She'd surprised the hell out of him with that manoeuvre, giving him the diversion he'd needed, smoking the crap out of his tyres to make enough room for him to get in … it _had_ been awesome.

"You're easy to please," she said, shifting her grip on the wheel slightly as a shower of the smaller debris hit the roof and back of the car. "Where am I going?"

He turned around, looking at the road critically. "Get us behind the barracks, and we'll swap."

She nodded and he saw a wince flash over her face. "What's wrong?"

"Not sure," she said tightly. "My side is stinging a bit."

His delight in their escape, in the destruction of the warehouse and, at the very least, the annihilation of the demons' meatsuits, vanished abruptly. Alex turned at the end of the road, pulling over beside the door into the long barrack building and stopped the car. She winced again as she felt the stinging sensation across her waist, looking down as Dean got out and walked around the car. He opened the driver's door and crouched just outside the car.

The hole in her jacket was easy to see from this side. Lifting the hem of the jacket up, he saw a red stain on the shirt beneath, around the edges of another hole, and he lowered the shirt and jacket, taking her hand and pressing it lightly against stains, looking up at her.

"We need to get somewhere safe," he said shortly. "Move over."

Alex slid along the seat, keeping her hand in place as she pushed the guns out of her way. "It's not – it just stings."

"Yeah," Dean said, pulling out and heading for the western entrance to the base, where the recreation park joined the grounds. "It's fine, it'll be fine, just stay still and we'll fix it up."

She nodded, leaning back and pushing down at the waistband of her jeans to stop it from touching the sore area. She'd seen him look at something on her clothes, but she hadn't been able to see what it was, the angle too acute for her, her rucked up clothing blocking her view. She trusted him, she realised slowly. Trusted him not to lie to her, to do what he said he would do.

* * *

On the other side of the base, the houses disappeared fast and they drove through farmland, the sun still on the eastern side of the sky, the air cold and fresh through the open window. Dean saw what he wanted after ten miles, pulling off the road onto a bumpy dirt farm track and heading for the old barn that stood to one side of the farmhouse.

He got out and pulled the doors open, getting back in the car and driving inside, and closing them again when he turned off the engine. Just a scratch, most likely, he thought, walking back to the car. But they'd stay put for a while. The barn was full of hay, it would insulate them from the cold effectively.

"Okay," he said as he got back in the front seat. "Unzip that jacket and take it off this side."

Alex unzipped the coat and pulled her arm out, setting her teeth as the movement drew a sharp pain from her side. She peered down at her shirt, and saw the red stain against it.

"Did I get shot?"

Dean lifted up the shirt carefully. Under it, the long-sleeved soft shirt was also stained with blood, and the hole in it was elongated, blackened at the edges. He lifted it up, peeling it gently away from the skin, and let out his breath.

"Just a graze, along the skin," he said, looking at her. "Hold this up, away from your skin, I'll get the medkit."

He backed out of the car and pulled the keys out, going to the trunk, feeling his heartrate settle down. There was a bullet hole in the driver's door. Must have just clipped her as she'd made that fast turn. He'd find another hole somewhere on the passenger side of the car. He opened the trunk and pushed the cases of mines and ammo aside, reaching to the back for the first aid box and pulling it out.

Closing the trunk again, he glanced at the driver's door as he got in, and he could see the line it would have made. She'd been on the edge of the seat to reach the pedals, otherwise it'd have missed her completely.

"Lie down," he said, opening the kit and pulling out the small bottle of saline water and a handful of gauze pads. "Bleeding's nearly stopped."

He cleaned and irrigated the long, narrow graze, and filled it with antibiotic powder, then taped down two dressings over it, packing away the kit as he looked at her.

"You want something for the pain?"

Alex shook her head. "It's not bad. Probably be better if I'm not dulled down until we're home."

She straightened up, lifting her shirt back down over the dressing and easing herself upright to pull her jacket around herself again.

"So, do we get going?" she asked him, looking at her watch. It was only nine o'clock.

He shook his head. "No. I'm guessing you're a little hyped up on adrenalin right now. That's gonna dissipate and then you'll feel like crap. So we'll stay here, get some sleep. Have something hot to eat. We'll get going tomorrow morning."

Her brows rose. "That long?"

He smiled a little at the dismay in her voice. "Hey, hurting my feelings here. Trust me, you need the rest. _I_ need the rest."

She looked around the barn mistrustfully. "What if they find us here?"

"They won't," he said, going back to the trunk and pulling out a couple of bags of salt.

"But what if they do?" she pressed as he came back to the door, carrying them.

He looked at her patiently. "They won't."

Turning away, he walked to the doors, dropping one bag to the ground and tipping the other one up, spilling a thick line of salt across the doorway. He ran salt around the few window ledges and across the threshold of the smaller door at the other end of the barn and ran a final wide circle right around the car.

Alex watched him throw the bags onto the hay and get back in the car.

"The salt is protection, I guess … against demons?" she asked.

He nodded. "And spirits."

"What about the other ones, the other monsters?"

"Not much in the way of actual protection against most of them," he said, picking up the shotgun and pulling a box of shells from his jacket pocket to reload it. "Just vigilance, and hunting them down."

She yawned widely and covered her mouth. Catching the movement, his mouth lifted on one side. "Told you."

"I'm alright," she said, setting her teeth against another jaw-creaking yawn. She felt the tiredness crashing through her. He was right, the adrenalin high had peaked and she was going to be wallowing in the after-effects for the next couple of hours at least, now they'd stopped moving, stopped running. Her eyelids drooped and she wondered if there was any point fighting it.

"What kills demons?" she forced the question out, because that was a piece of information she really did want to know.

"Not much that we've found," Dean said quietly as he pushed the shells into the magazine. "I've got a knife that can kill them. Otherwise, all we can do is exorcise them, send 'em back to Hell."

"Exorcise them? Really?" She yawned again, turning her head away and letting her eyelids close.

"Yeah, really," he said, amusement warming his voice as he looked over at her. "Stop talking and go to sleep."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Debbie lay back against the piled heap of pillows, panting shallowly as her body rippled and clenched. Tim stood by the bed, staring at the movements of the skin and the muscles beneath in amazement, holding her hand as she sucked in a deep breath and pushed again.

"That's good, Deb, one more big one and he'll crown," Renee promised, standing at the end of the bed, keeping one eye on the blood pressure monitor and another on the heart monitor, both of which were showing reassuring responses. "Lise, we got clamps and scissors ready?"

Lisa nodded, the tray on the dresser covered in sealed packs. On the other side of the bed, Debbie's daughter, Mary stood, watching wide-eyed as her baby brother was being born.

Debbie grunted as she pushed again, and felt the baby move through, her skin stretching out and out, the burning sensation going deeper and deeper, and then stopping, softening, as the head came out. She felt the shoulders twisting, sliding out easily, Renee's hands supporting him as she pushed again.

Renee cleared the baby's eyes, nose and mouth, drying him and wrapping him and passing him to his mother. The umbilical cord was a bright blue, disappearing back inside her, and they'd wait until the blood flow had diminished before cutting it.

"See, Mare? This is Thomas, he's your baby brother," Debbie said tiredly, holding him up a little as Mary leaned over the side of the bed. She looked up at Tim with a half-smile, his fingers closing gently around her shoulder as he looked down at the little boy.

"Just in time for Christmas," Lisa said, looking over Mary's head at the baby.

"Let's get this cleared away and make the bed fresh," Renee said to her, glancing to the doorway. Michelle brought in fresh towels and a folded cotton sheet and Lisa pulled out the soiled towels and cloths, pushing them into a bag and handing them to Michelle as the clean ones went underneath Debbie.

"No painkillers, no interventions, no emergencies … just the way I like 'em," Renee said smugly as she folded the sheets back down.

* * *

"Speaking of Christmas, what, if anything, are we doing about it?" Lisa said as she walked down the hall with Renee after Debbie and Thomas had been settled.

"Well, shouldn't have much problem with finding a tree," Renee said with a shrug.

"I meant, do we remember the holiday? Have special food, presents for the kids, that stuff?"

"Oh."

They walked into the kitchen and Ellen and Michelle looked around. "Oh … what?" Michelle asked curiously.

"Christmas," Lisa repeated, gesturing vaguely around the room. "A tree, special food, presents for the kids, that stuff."

Ellen looked at them. "I don't know you'll find too many toys left around."

Renee looked at her thoughtfully. "No, but they don't need toys, as such. We could make candies. Liev's a carpenter, isn't he?" Ellen nodded.

"Maybe he could make some pull-along toys, for the littlest ones," she said slowly. "I'll talk to Bobby, he'll know who can do what."

Renee turned to leave and stopped, turning back. "Lise, check how much sugar we've got and if Ty got much maple syrup from that farm. And if anyone knows any good candy recipes."

Ellen hid her smile as she stirred the big pot of venison stew. Cutting pine branches, collecting pine cones, popcorn garlands, it was starting to get a bit reminiscent of her childhood.

* * *

_**Brown Road, Michigan**_

Dean sat on a couple of hay bales, leaning back against the stack behind him. He'd rolled up one blanket and put it under Alex's head, spreading the other one over her after she'd gone to sleep in the corner of the seat and door and he'd shifted her down to lay flat on the front seat of the car. She fit easily along it, and hadn't stirred and he guessed that her sleep had been pretty thin the last two nights. He hadn't had that much himself, but a few more hours wouldn't matter to him, after years of controlling his body's needs, he knew his limits intimately.

His mouth twitched up at the corner as he replayed their escape again in his head. It'd been one of those moments, those rare, rare moments, when the action had been close enough to blockbuster-movie style to make it a memory he was happy to revisit, the danger muted under the recall of the getaway, fast and clean and explosive. He found himself wishing that Sam had been there to see it, or even Bobby or Rufus. Of course, he considered, if they had, it would've gone down completely differently.

From his vantage point on the bales, he could just see into the car enough to see Alex's hair, a tousled mop against the cream of the car's upholstery and the dark grey of the blanket. She'd surprised him – again, he thought. He'd almost given up on her being able to do anything when the shotgun had blown a hole in the demon closest to the car, stunning its partner and the one he'd been facing. The gunning of the engine, the shriek of the tyres over the slick concrete and the smoke that had poured from them had all helped, he couldn't've given her better instructions to make that moment work as well as it had. And driving out, she hadn't panicked, hadn't hesitated, had driven hell for leather across the apron when he'd told her to go. He smiled as the memory of her face, set and staring through the windshield, bright spots of colour on her cheeks, came back with full clarity. Her tone had been dry when she'd told him he was easy to please.

The smile vanished a second later. She'd heard the demon, he knew. Had heard what it'd said. About him. About Sam. About Hell.

She hadn't asked, and he wasn't sure if she would. He thought she had a good sense for what people were uncomfortable with, for not pressing subjects that were painful. But it troubled him that she'd heard.

He'd told Sam that he'd tortured the souls of the damned, and that he'd enjoyed it. And he'd told his brother that he wished he couldn't feel anything, ever again. It didn't begin to cover what had happened in those ten years. Or what he'd felt. Or how it had changed him. He wasn't sure, sometimes, that he was even him anymore. He couldn't look at that time, couldn't see what had been ripped away or what might have been left in its place. Sometimes, he felt a crawling sensation, deep down inside and he couldn't get rid of it, couldn't make it stop.

He remembered everything. Every detail seared into his mind, acid-etched into his soul. There wasn't anywhere deep enough to keep those memories from surfacing. He'd gotten used to not sleeping, waking every three hours, sometime a little more, sometimes a little less. He'd learned to keep the screams inside, at first not to wake his brother, now so that he wouldn't wake Lisa or the rest of the people in the house. He'd learned to find the balance in a bottle between blurring his past and keeping his present sharp. He couldn't fuck with his senses too much because that would almost certainly kill him with a moment of carelessness, or someone else, someone he was supposed to looking out for, but he knew the line he could dull it all down to.

He'd learned to build walls, in his head, in his mind. They bulged outwards with the pressure of the crap he kept behind them, but they were holding, mostly. The seepage kept him separate from other people, and that could only be a good thing at this point, right?

There was a part of him that was ready and willing to go to Michael. Even Cas' assertion that he'd be left as a drooling vegetable when the archangel had finished with him wasn't a deterrent, not any more. The only thing that stopped him was the knowledge that if the two angels were allowed to meet on the field of battle, the fallout would be cataclysmic. And he couldn't, wouldn't, be party to that.

He looked at his watch. Two o'clock. He'd let her sleep until dark. She could take the first watch tonight and he'd take over before midnight. It would be enough sleep for him.

Rubbing a hand over his face, he tipped his head back and closed his eyes, listening to the stillness of day, only a faint whispering sough of the light breeze in amongst the high rafters of the place.

_But daddy's little girl, he broke. He broke in thirty. Oh, just not the man your daddy wanted you to be, huh, Dean?_

The demon's voice slid into his mind and his eyes closed more tightly against that memory. He'd known he couldn't do it, had known he couldn't walk that line again, had argued with Cas but the whole time, a part of him had wanted to pick up the tools again, pick them up and carve his name into the demon's meatsuit and hear Alastair scream for mercy.

He should've known better.

He wasn't the man he thought his father had wanted him to be. Wasn't the man he'd wanted to be. That knowledge was the rock against which he broke, every morning when he opened his eyes and found he was still alive.

The thought of anyone knowing what the demon knew – or what Cas knew, for that matter – shook him down to the marrow of his bones.

_Do you really think this is gonna fix you? Give you closure? That is sad. That's really sad._

No, he hadn't thought he'd get closure. He hadn't thought he'd get anything but a fleeting sense of satisfaction that he could turn the tables on the demon and get a little payback for what had been done to him. It hadn't worked and somewhere, down inside, he'd known it wouldn't. Being tortured hadn't broken him. It'd been picking up the razor and turning it on another that had done that job.

_Fuck, get out of your head_, he told himself, feeling his knuckles creak with the strain of his clenched fists. _Stop. Just stop_.

_I carved you into a new animal, Dean. There is no going back._

When that first soul's agony had hit him, it'd been something between touching a live, hot wire and an intense orgasm, crackling along the remembered nerves of his memories of his body, lighting him up to the point that he'd stood there and shaken for an unknown length of time, the demon's raucous laughter filling the cavern, filling his mind, spattering over him like a spray of acid. It'd been impossible to tell if it had been pain or pleasure he'd felt and a long time later, Alastair had confirmed that that was the point.

He'd gotten used to it, very gradually, had learned that, like anything, repeated sensation desensitised, needing more and more to get the same feeling. It'd been sometime around then that he'd first felt the tickling, crawling touch inside. It'd been then that he'd begun to withdraw, what was left of the man who'd made a deal to save his brother pulling away from the soul that was blackening and corroding, day by endless day.

He would die, he thought bleakly, if he had to face that through someone else's eyes. The shame would kill him. Sam had told him that he'd been under duress, that he hadn't known, that it wasn't his fault that he'd given up … but he'd known what he'd chosen. He'd known that the choice would turn him, as Ruby had told him, into the thing he most hated.

The sound of a boot hitting something inside the car was loud and he sat up, sliding off the bale and going to the Impala, relieved that he could push away those thoughts and feelings and do something real, something concrete. His brows drew together as he got close to the car and saw Alex thrashing around inside.

Walking around to the passenger door, and opening it, his first thought was infection, although it was too soon. He saw her eyes were shut tightly, her hands knotted into fists, swinging wildly against the back of the seat and the dash, legs drawn up and pistoning into the driver's door irregularly.

_Nightmare._

Putting the shotgun down, he leaned into the car, his head jerking to one side as he avoided one flailing fist, grabbing her wrists and holding her still.

"Alex, wake up."

Her eyes flew open, the pupils hugely dilated and white visible right around the irises as she stared up at him. Her chest was heaving as she panted, he saw her throat work as she swallowed fast, struggling to take a deeper breath.

"Just a nightmare, it's okay," he told her, letting go and leaning on the roof of the car.

She sat up, wiping a shaking hand over her face and through her hair, looking at the moisture on her palm disorientedly and wiping it off against the side of her jacket.

"What?"

"Nightmare," he repeated slowly. "You were having a nightmare."

"Oh," she said, nodding as she looked down at the floor. "Right."

"The graze," he said, gesturing at her side. "It burning or throbbing?"

"No."

Not infection then, he decided, looking down at her face. Whatever the dream'd been about, it'd been powerful. "You been having them for long?"

"Uh, no, they come and go," she said lightly, turning her head away from him to look through the windshield. "Not this bad, usually."

_That was a lie_, he thought, looking at her pulse, still beating hard against the thin skin of her neck.

"The ghoul attack?"

"Yeah," she agreed immediately, and he thought that was another lie, mixed in with the truth.

"You okay?" he asked. "It can help to talk about them."

Not that he'd found, but everyone kept telling him that. He was prepared to listen, if she needed to talk. Just not reciprocate, he thought dryly.

"No, it's fine," she said, shaking her head, apparently oblivious to the drops of sweat that flew off the ends of her hair. "I'm okay. Is it my watch?"

"If you want," he said, a little reluctantly. She needed the sleep more than he did, but she wouldn't, he knew. Not now. He wouldn't've.

"Yeah." She straightened up, waiting for him to move and getting out of the car when he stepped back. Taking the shotgun from him, she asked, "What time do you want to eat?"

"Just on dark, wake me then," he said, wondering if he should watch her for a while. He didn't think she'd welcome the scrutiny, or say anything further. He slid into the passenger seat, reaching back to close the door as she walked away. He just fit along the seat, and he stretched out, crossing his ankles and sliding an arm under his head and closing his eyes.

He didn't think he'd sleep, just rest for a while, but sleep came, dragging him down, a powerful undertow that pushed him deeper and deeper.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

It was snowing as the black car drove up to the gate, and Maurice was wrapped to the eyeballs in scarf and knitted cap and gloves. Dean and Alex got out of the car, shivering as they swallowed the iced holy water and felt the cold metal blades against their bare skin.

"Everything quiet?" Dean asked the hunter, pulling down his sleeves.

Maurice nodded. "Quiet as the grave. Debbie had a baby boy. No problems."

Dean got back in the car, glancing at Alex as she got in the other side. The gate rumbled open and he looked up at the tower as he let the car idle through, seeing Rufus' dark eyes crinkling down at him between layers of knitted cap and wound-around scarf.

"Well, that's a relief," Alex said softly. He nodded.

The car's tyres crunched over the gravel beneath the crisp white covering, and he pulled up in front of the house, brows rising as he took in the string of coloured lights that had been fastened along the porch roof line and wound around the columns.

"Festive," he commented wryly, getting out.

The comment surprised a laugh out of Alex as she closed the passenger door and looked around the compound. "Be thankful they didn't find any Santas or elves in the houses."

They got to the top of the stairs and the front door opened. Lisa and Renee stood in the doorway, the slender brunette crossing the distance in a couple of strides and wrapping her arms around Dean tightly. She lifted her face from his chest, her hand curling around the back of his neck as he released her, drawing his head down for a kiss.

Renee walked past them, wiping her hands on the apron around her waist, and smiling at Alex. "You missed all the fun."

"I heard," Alex said, unwinding the long scarf around her neck as she followed her into the house. "Debbie's fine? And the baby?"

"Yes, easy, uncomplicated," Renee said, waiting as Alex pulled off her gloves and coat then turning for the kitchen. "Why are you making that face?"

"Oh, uh, I got a scratch and it's aching a bit," Alex said, smoothing out her expression quickly. "I'm dying for a cup of coffee, any left?"

"New pot," Renee assured her, making a mental note to check the 'scratch' later.

* * *

Dean looked around the living room as he walked in with Lisa, her arm still around his hips. The air smelled thickly of fresh cut pine, the walls and doorways hung with pine boughs and painted pine cones, an eight-foot tree standing in front of the line of windows on the southern wall, draped thickly with coloured-popcorn garlands, and the branches bowed under the weight of dozens of small, brightly coloured bags and candy canes.

"What's going on?" he asked, looking down at Lisa.

"Christmas," she said, her arm curling a little more closely around him as she burrowed under his shoulder.

"We were gone for three days," he said, gesturing around the room with his free hand.

She smiled up at him. "Well, it was a surprise."

He shrugged mentally. If they wanted to celebrate the holiday, it was fine with him. The children seemed to be enjoying it. Ellen's orphans filled the large room, their high, sweet voices babbling over each other as they sat in clusters around the big table and in front of the fire.

"We need to unload the car," he said to Lisa. "Grab the older kids, okay?"

She nodded and walked up the stairs, and he turned to Bobby's office, walking in and closing the door behind him.

Ellen looked up from the chair by the desk, her face creasing into a wide smile. "How was Grand Rapids?"

"Empty," Dean said, looking at Bobby. "Ran into some demons at Battle Creek."

"Many?"

He shook his head. "No, scouting party, I think. Dead scouting party now."

Watching their faces as he told them about the base, he thought neither was particularly surprised.

"There's another NG base at Selfridge," Ellen said. "If the weather clears, we could go down and grab some of their vehicles, load them up and bring them back, blow it up behind us?"

Bobby nodded, rubbing his forehead tiredly. "Yeah, well, we'll figure something out. One thing," he said, turning slightly to look through the window behind him. "This weather isn't just keeping us pinned down. Should keep everyone quiet for a few weeks."

He looked back to Dean. "Got a call from Emmett yesterday, he's in Ohio. Said he's stuck down there but he's got a solution."

"Solution?" Dean asked, looking at Ellen and back to Bobby. "What kind of solution?"

"Didn't say. Told me to expect them in a few days."

"The roads aren't going to be passable soon," Dean said. "It's falling harder now, and we were sliding around, coming up here."

"Have to wait and see." Bobby leaned back in his chair, pushing his cap up a little. "Anyway, what did you manage to get hold of?"

* * *

_The woods were deep and very dark and she could hear noises coming from them, disturbing animalistic noises that were like no animal she'd ever heard. She was afraid to look at them, keeping her gaze fixed on the clearing in front of her, a wide, green lawn that ran up to a huge, stone mansion, built in the gothic style, with flying buttresses jutting out from the walls and gargoyles staring down from the high pitch of the roofline._

_A man stood in the middle of the emerald-green grass, very tall, broad-shouldered, with long chestnut-brown hair that lifted in the light breeze. He wore a crisply white suit, tailored precisely to fit, a silk shirt under it that was so deep a red it almost appeared black. He was staring at another man, who stood several yards from him. Even with his back to her, she recognised Dean, her brow creasing up as she wondered what he was doing here._

_Her perspective shifted abruptly and she was sitting in a stone and wrought iron gazebo, trailing vines filtering the bright sunlight to a soft green inside. The two men hadn't moved but she could see Dean's face now, twisted in anguish as he stared at the man in white, his mouth moving, his eyes pleading._

_The tall man lifted his hand and light poured from it, a brilliant, eye-searing white. She threw her arm over her eyes and turned her head away, the after-image burning against the darkness of her lids, the light piercing through Dean as he'd stood there._

_The light vanished and she lowered her arm, opening her eyes cautiously and looking around. She was no longer in the garden. The room was long, the ceilings very high, vaulted and dim. Marble pillars broke up the open space and she saw the man in white standing at one end, in front of a broad, low dais. On the dais, in the centre, a golden throne stood, elaborately carved with fantastical beings._

_Dean was in front of the man again, crouched down on the floor, his weight over one knee and one hand. He lifted his head to look at the man and she saw that his eyes were a pure, milky white, the irises gone. The sight frightened her._

_He got to his feet slowly and straightened, squaring his shoulders as he began to walk toward the man in white._

_She felt hands clutching at her as she tried to follow him, her mouth opening in a scream when she looked down and saw the creatures that were holding her, grey-skinned, pocked and wrinkled and decomposing, red eyes that flickered to black and back. They pulled at her arms, turning her around, away from the men, and she pulled back sharply as she saw Jimmy walking toward her, his eyes a shining black from corner to corner, the long carving knife in his hand winking in the flat light._

Alex sat up in her bed, shuddering as she clamped her teeth together, holding in the scream she could feel in her throat. The sheets around her were cold and damp, and she ran a hand through her hair, feeling the moisture collecting against it, wiping it on the bedcovers. She pushed back the covers and swung her legs out, hunching over as she shivered uncontrollably, the cold air of the room freezing the sweat on her body, chilling her deeply.

What had that been, she wondered, getting to her feet, staggering a little and reaching out for the nightstand until her legs felt less wobbly. Turning, she stripped the bedding from the mattress, throwing it onto the floor. She grabbed her robe from the back of the door and walked unsteadily down to the bathroom, flipping on the light and staring at her face in the mirror over the sink. She was soaked, her hair flat and sticky with sweat, her eyes wide, the lids bruised and swollen as if she'd been crying. Turning away from the mirror, she pulled off the sodden pyjamas and put them in the sink, turning the taps on in the shower and getting under the spray as soon as it had warmed enough.

She leaned against the tiles, letting the water pound over her, feeling the chill dissipate slowly under its force, her shivering stop. Grabbing the soap, she washed furiously, scrubbing every inch of skin, as if the dream clung to her, stinking in the close, warm air of the cubicle. She washed the salt from her hair and looked down at herself, skin reddened and stinging, the dressing that covered the long graze on her side half peeled off, the raw flesh underneath aching as the water trickled over it.

Turning off the taps, she got out, reaching out for a towel. She wrapped it around herself, retaining the warmth of the shower under its folds as she thought about the rest of the night.

She couldn't go back to sleep, it was out of the question. Read, she thought, just get dressed, go downstairs and read until morning. The decision steadied her. Looking at her pyjamas in the sink, she pulled them out, wringing them as dry as possible and hanging them over the rail. The dressing needed replacing as well, one end of the adhesive tape flapping loose. She gripped it and yanked it off, patting it dry and opening the cupboard to get a clean one. As soon as she'd stuck it on, she hurried out of the bathroom and across the hall.

The bedroom smelled vaguely of sour sweat, Alex thought, wrinkling her nose up as she closed the door behind her. Looking at the pile of damp linen on the floor briefly, she turned away, getting clean clothes from the dresser and pulling them on quickly.

She turned off the light and walked downstairs, pulling the thick, knitted jumper down.

The living room fire had been banked and she opened the flue a little, stirring the burning wood and adding more logs. The room wasn't cold but the fire would add heat and she needed to feel warm again.

When the flames were stronger again, she walked slowly along the bookshelves, head tilted to one side as she read the titles. She stopped and smiled faintly as she reached for the title that had leapt out at her. An old favourite, it was probably a little too close to their real life situation to be an escape, but, she decided, misery loved company and she could stand reading about someone else's troubles for a while. Turning from the shelves, she walked to the armchair next to the hearth and curled into it, opening the book and focussing on the words on the page.

_I can't help but wonder how you fit in up here, after all those years of slicing and dicing, tearing them up and ripping them apart and drinking the pain and the blood as it flowed out of them?_

_Oh, I have my outlets, even up here._

She looked up from the page she was reading, staring at the fire as the memory of the conversation flowed through her mind. She hadn't been paying attention to it at the time, or afterward on the drive home. The demon had known him, she thought distractedly, looking down at the book on her lap again. She hadn't gotten the impression that Dean had known precisely who he was talking to, but the demon had known him, known him well from the casual tone of the conversation.

How was that possible, she wondered uneasily. _Sammy's been looking for you, Dean, he's gonna be so pleased to see you when we take you in. You mean Lucifer, don't you?_

What did that mean? _It means it's none of your business_, she told herself sharply. He hadn't mentioned it on the drive back, or when they'd been in the barn. She didn't know him well, but she knew people well enough to know that when they didn't raise a topic themselves, it was one they didn't want to discuss.

She tried to focus on the words again. They swam in front of her, tiredness seeping back in. She could just close her eyes for a minute, she thought. Not sleep, just give her eyes a break.

* * *

The snow kept coming. Dean lifted another shovelful and threw it to one side, Maurice ahead of him, Jo behind, as they, along with Duncan, Ben, Alanna, Hank, Alan and Taylor, cleared the path from the house down to the barn. Across a lumpy swathe of white, he could see Father Michael, Michelle, Lisa and Ellen clearing the paths to the church/school.

Bobby, Franklin, and Rufus were making snowshoes to add to the number they'd picked up in fall. The kids didn't use them, out every day in the deepening drifts, shovelling and bringing in firewood from the massive cords stacked along the buildings' walls, red-faced, their shrieks echoing around the still woods and carrying over the ice-crusted water. Lake Solitude would be hard-frozen by January. The hay would last, and so would their food and no one had heard anything on the radio about movement anywhere else, the series of cold fronts from the north reaching far down the country and bringing most of the states to a standstill.

The mines had been laid. Under the forest and along the road, fish-scaled in overlapping arcs, the outermost markers armed with tripwires, the inner curves set with remote detonators, to be set off in series if an attack came. The additional defences had calmed a lot of Dean's fears about being overrun, the perpetual nightmare of being a small group against many.

Training had been stepped up, now that they couldn't spend so much time scavenging. He'd watched the civilians going through the target shooting, noting the naturals automatically. It wasn't enough, shooting at a static target that didn't shoot back, but it was a start. And he was working on a way to get them better prepared.

To the east, there was a low, mournfully deep hoot and everyone looked up. The sound had come from Lake Huron, and the lake had been silent for months.

"That was a boat," Maurice said unnecessarily. "A fog horn off a big one."

Dean nodded, glancing back at the house. Along the porch rail he saw Renee and Rufus, both leaning out and peering into the white mist that hid the lake from view six days out of ten.

"Close or far?" Jo looked past him, still holding a shovel-load of snow.

"Over water, hard to tell," Dean said tightly. "Get the kids inside, everyone who can shoot straight out here."

He pushed his shovel into the deep snow beside the path and turned to walk back up to the house. At the top of the porch steps, he met Bobby, sitting in the chair, his head tilted to one side.

"Fog horn?" Bobby asked. Dean nodded, walking past him into the house.

He stopped as Alex came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish-cloth.

"Where's the nearest place along the lake that a big boat could land?"

"Behind the hook," she said, gesturing south of the camp. "The cove between the camp and town is deep water, right to the shore."

"Jo's getting the kids back, keep everyone inside and just wait until you hear from me," he said, turning on his heel and heading back outside.

By the time he was at the barn, there were fourteen people following him, armed and tense, looking out at the fog that hung over the water. Ellen increased her stride, floundering through the deeper drifts as she caught up to him.

"You think it's an attack?" she asked him in a low voice. He shook his head.

"I don't know what it is, but we haven't heard or seen anyone on the lake since it all went to hell, so we're not taking chances." He glanced sideways at her. "Take Jo, Hank, Ty and Rona down the southern point of the beach; tell Boze to take the others to the end of the hook."

She nodded, dropping back and gesturing to her daughter, stopping and passing along the orders. Looking back, she saw Dean, Rufus and Risa moving through the trees, toward the centre of the cove.

The high, dark metal wall appeared through the fog, white painted letters and numbers under the taff rail on one side. Dean watched the sharp metal prow crush the thin shore ice as it came closer, heard the low throb of big engines and the slap of the waves it pushed ahead ripple along the icy pebbled shore.

There was a sudden increase in the engine revs as the boat went into reverse, and its forward motion ceased, then the engines died and silence dropped over the cove. Looking up, he could see the thick, welded pipe railing, almost twenty feet above him. He gestured sharply to Rufus with one hand, watching as he climbed higher then looked back at the boat.

Voices were muffled in the thickness of the fog and Dean shifted along the treeline, stopping as he saw movement above him. Three people walked along the deck, behind the railing, their outlines indistinct until they moved right up to the rail, all three lined up and looking down.

"You've got twenty guns aimed at your head," Dean called out. "What's your business here?"

One of the figures leaned further out and he saw thinning blonde hair, a craggy, square face, reddened skin speckled with frost, half-hidden by a thick scarf wound around the man's neck.

"Not looking for trouble, friend," the man called down, his voice echoing oddly from the rocks and trees. "Looking for Bobby Singer."

Dean glanced at Rufus, who was peering at the man from behind a tree, a few yards higher up the slope.

"Emmett? That you?" Rufus moved out a little from the trees.

"Rufus? Yeah, it's me," Emmett turned his head to look at the hunter. "I told Singer I'd get here, didn't I?"

Dean straightened up and walked out of the trees. "Didn't say you coming by boat."

"Dean?"

"Yeah," Dean waved his rifle above his head. Around the cove, fingers slipped from triggers, safeties were thumbed on and barrels were lowered. "How the hell d'you steal that!?"

Emmett grinned down at him. "Just borrowed it, was sitting at the dock, all fuelled up and ready to go, and we were running out of options."

Ellen walked up the beach, her shotgun held in the crook of her arm. "Emmett, you damned show-off."

"Ellen, my god, woman, you are a sight for sore eyes," Emmett said, one bushy blonde brow rising suggestively. "Been a long time."

She snorted, a faint blush rising up her neck. "Not long enough."

* * *

They threw down thick warps from the bow to the shore, using the derricks on the boat to lift a cut-down tree from the steepest point of the cove's slope to the deck to serve as a gangplank. The boat would be iced in over the next couple of months, Dean thought, feeling the bite in the air as he worked.

Emmett and Max had brought in another twenty-five people, mostly survivors, three hunters that he hadn't met before, a few slaves, another ten kids. He'd watched them come down the roughly trimmed log, following Lisa and Jo back to the camp, shivering and dirty, thin and scarred. The boat was carrying supplies, which had been transferred straight away. He'd caught Alex's eye when she'd come down to look over the food and equipment and she'd nodded to him. It would be enough, even with the extras.

Accommodation would be tight, but with the extra people they could build more. In the long machinery shed, the liberated bulldozer and backhoe, grader and roller were parked, ready to go to work.

When the last of the crew and supplies had been unloaded, Emmett started the engines again, reversing the boat gently out to the length of the lines holding her to the shore and had dropped an anchor aft. As he shut down the engines, the boat surged forward with the pull of the warps and stopped, the anchor digging in, holding the boat firmly between chain and warp, twenty yards offshore and secure enough to withstand all but a hurricane.

"Came up from Florida," Emmett said to Dean as they walked back along the beaten-down trail to the camp. "Had to go inland when I hit the Carolinas, too many croaties, hunting for people along the coast now."

"Hunting?" Dean lifted a brow at him. "Organised?"

Emmett nodded. "Not Army-organised, but tribal organised," he clarified. "Saw one of their camps … they found tents, tarps, using anything for shelters. They're not interested in hunting animals, there's a load of game through that country but every bone in the camp was human."

"Awesome."

"Yeah," Emmett said, sighing. "We saw them as far north as New York, didn't get any closer after that first camp."

"What about other hunters? Survivors?"

"As you see, Dean," Emmett said, gesturing vaguely around the camp. "There're probably a lot more but they're hiding, too afraid to come out, risk themselves."

Dean nodded. "And slaves? See anyone collecting?"

"A few groups." He looked down at the path. "Demons by the hundreds. Do you know what's going on? A lot of the action seemed to be down south."

"Yeah, Lucifer's gathering up survivors. Getting power back on in the cities. Looking for skilled people, technicians. He's already hit half the Army bases on this side, outfitting the demons."

"And the plan?"

Dean snorted softly. "Stay alive, for now. We need to get the people who want to get free, free –"

"Want to get free? Anyone not want that?"

"Surprisingly yeah," Dean said, rubbing a hand over his cheek. "Ellen brought a man in who was a slave in Wichita. Said there were a load of people just working for the demons without coercion."

"Jesus, you sure?" Emmett stopped on the trail, looking at him.

"Yeah, we're sure." Dean stopped and looked at him. "Some folks just want to be able to microwave their popcorn, I guess." He looked up at the house, lights shining in the deepening gloom. "C'mon, you might as well have something to eat and be sitting in the warm when you hear all this crap."

* * *

Dean sat at the table at the far end of the living room, watching the people in his care. Of the fifteen adults who'd come in with Emmett, four were hunters. Max, of course, she'd been hunting with Emmett since she was seventeen and although the two of them didn't seem to be romantically involved, he'd never seen one without the other. Vincent Mulligan, somewhere in his late thirties, hunted ghouls and vampire down south all his life. Michael Santorini, late twenties, hunted the north-eastern states and had hooked up with them after running for his life from a bunch of croaties. And Maggie, well-known to Bobby, Rufus and Ellen, although he'd never met her, never even heard of her, in her late fifties, with hard, dark eyes, a face like tanned leather and a choice selection of phrases to describe the utter cluster-fuck she'd been through, fighting her way out of Boston. He rolled one of the more colourful comments around in his mind, trying it on for size, the corner of his mouth lifting.

The civilians were a mixed bunch as well. Six men and five women. Two of the men and four of the women were survivors, picked up from small towns along the long road north. The other three men and one woman had been rescued from a slave camp, on their way to Atlanta, arms branded, shock and horror still filling their faces. Four of the kids belonged to the survivors, the rest were orphans, who'd survived somehow on their own until Emmett and Max had rolled into their towns.

"Hey," Lisa said, sitting down beside him. "Good thing we picked up those camp beds."

He looked at her, nodding. "Everyone got a bed?"

"Yeah. Emmett's sharing with Vincent, in Cas' cabin. Max is sharing with Rona and Risa. Uh … Maggie's sharing with Renee. Michael's in with Chuck, Hank and Liev. Larry and Greg have got bunks in with Boze and Ty, Anna and Marie are sharing a bedroom, the kids have been squeezed in, Troy, Yuri and Dave are in with Maurice. Dominique is sharing a room with Michelle, and Sally and Rose have the last of the upstairs bedrooms," she said, her eyes moving around the room, looking at the unfamiliar faces as she thought of all the people who'd come in. Introductions had been brief, and Renee had already made a comment about a mess hall if everyone was eating at the house. "Alex says there's room in the attics, over the bedrooms, if we can line the roof."

"Might come to that," Dean said, looking around. "We're not doing much until the snow stops, anyway." He saw Ben, sitting on the floor, deep in conversation with Alan and Taylor and two of the new kids. "Ben's not going to be short of friends, at least."

Lisa turned to follow his gaze and smiled. "No, not like when we got here."

"I'm kind of surprised so many kids survived," he said, looking around the room. The smallest had gone to bed, but there were still at least eight or nine, ranging from nine maybe to mid-teens, talking, working at the long narrow table, playing one or another of the old-fashioned board-games they'd been able to find, or cards with some of the adults.

"Kids are strong," she said, turning to look at him. "You told me that."

He looked around as Ellen and Jo walked over to them. "How come you never cooked for me and Sam?"

Ellen's mouth twisted up on one side. "You two never stayed around long enough to get fed." She sat down at the table, nodding to Lisa as Jo sat down next to her.

"Might've stayed if we'd been fed," he said dryly. "How's the armoury looking?"

She nodded. "Enough to arm a battalion, if we can get the people."

"Yeah, well, nothing's happening until spring."

"You know, we could use that boat Emmett took," Ellen said, flicking a glance toward Lisa and back to him. "Carry an awful lot of people out that way."

"I know." He turned to look at Bobby and Rufus, playing poker by the fire at the other end of the room. "We'll think about it."

"What about in the meantime, Dean?" Jo asked, leaning forward on her elbows. "We've got a lot of people with not much to do but sit and cool their heels."

He looked at her. "Most of these people'll welcome a break from struggling, Jo. And everyone needs to get a good idea of handling a weapon. You're doing a good job with the kids, but we need to get them used to picking their targets … hunting."

"Most of us can manage to take down a deer if we have to … we could take them out to the forest," Ellen suggested diffidently. "It would kill a few birds."

Teach them to stalk, he thought, to be aware of being watched, and bring in extra food.

"Yeah, okay," he said to Ellen. "Start with teams of four, any more and you're risking them hitting each other. Two hunters, two adults, four of the older kids to start with."

"How long?"

"They can start with two-day trips, get well up north and west."

"Alex told us there was always ice-fishing in the lake," Jo added, with a graceful gesture in its general direction. "Liev suggested that he take a few people out there, and get us some fish."

Dean shrugged. "So long as they're back before dark and there's at least one hunter with them."

She nodded, getting up and sauntering back across the room. Ellen watched the deliberate swing in her ass, the corner of her mouth tucked in. Her daughter never gave up on what she wanted and competition tended to make her more determined.

"Now," she said, turning back to look at Dean. "This Christmas thing the padre has in mind –"

He held up his hands to stop her. "Not my department," he said, gesturing to Lisa as he got up. Ellen raised a brow at Lisa, both watching him as he walked down to Bobby and Rufus.

"He's trying to stay out of the 'civilian business'," Lisa said. "What did you want to know?"

* * *

The snow stopped on Christmas Eve, and they were able to clear the paths to the cabins and buildings properly for a change. In front of Father Michael's small church, the children had built a nativity scene with snowmen and snow sheep and snow cows, not all necessarily recognisable, but definitely in the spirit of the day, Dean'd thought as he'd finished nailing up the single string of multi-coloured lights around the front of the building.

Christmas dinner had been chaotic and noise-filled, but generous, every table dragged into the big dining room and joined together, covered with linen and lit with candles and decorated with holly and small pine branches and cones. Wild duck, venison, enormous roasted hams and a surprising variety of root vegetables had filled the tables, accompanied by freshly baked bread and followed by pie and roasted fruit and nuts. Every adult and most of the young teens had contributed something to the table or to the heap of presents that covered the space under the tree and watching the contentment on the faces of the people surrounding him, he realised that the one simple event had changed their views of their futures from bleak to hopeful.

After dinner and the massive cleanup that followed, the house had cleared, and he could hear snatches of song coming from the church. He built up the fire a little more and walked out to the porch, seeing the small building glowing against the dark pine forest, golden light spilling from the windows and the tiny coloured light bulbs bright against the black outline. Outside, the singing was more audible, a harmonious lifting of voices into the night that brought an unconscious smile.

To his right, a shadow moved and he saw Alex leaning on the railing, eyes closed as she listened to the carols.

"Thought you'd be over there," he said, walking up beside her.

"I was, earlier. It's packed inside, and it got too uncomfortable," she said, keeping her eyes shut. "Lisa and Ben were there, you didn't want to be with them?"

He shifted his feet uncomfortably. "Not really much of a singer."

She didn't respond to that and he turned to look at her, the outside lights reflecting from the snow beneath them, lighting up her face.

"Nightmares still coming?" he asked quietly, seeing the hollows under her eyes. She stiffened slightly, the tightening barely perceptible.

"Not so much now," she said.

Another lie, he thought, wondering why. She didn't seem the type to lie much. Everyone had their secrets, he thought. He couldn't tell anyone his either. He inhaled, feeling the cold air bite into his lungs.

"Lisa said something about being able to use the attics?" he asked, changing the subject and seeing her relax a little.

"Yeah, above the bedrooms, there's a lot of space, but it needs lining. I think that timber place has drywall and lining board, probably insulation as well," she said, opening her eyes and glancing at him. "There's not much point building new cabins when there're perfectly serviceable houses in town."

"We can't protect the town, not yet," he said. He'd thought of it, but it was too big, too hard to watch all the entrances, all the approaches. "If we can get the people in Wichita out, then we have a shot at that."

She nodded slowly. "Can you? Save them, I mean?"

"I think so, when we can get through."

"You don't really want to be here, do you?"

The question took him by surprise and he looked back at the church, wondering how to answer it. "I've got something else I need to do."

Turning around, he leaned against the rail. "But I can't do it yet. Not until I know more about what's happening out there."

"You don't have to carry the responsibility of saving everyone, you know," she said softly, looking at him and gesturing to the lit church. "People will save themselves, if they have even the smallest chance."

He looked down at her for a moment, the pale golden light outlining temple and cheekbone, the shape of her mouth and casting a long mauve shadow from her lashes across her cheek.

"I have to save as many as I can," he said. "I have to give them that chance."

She looked at him, her eyes searching his. Whatever she was looking for, he thought, she didn't appear to find it, nodding slightly and glancing back at the church.

"Merry Christmas," she said, over her shoulder as she walked back into the house.

"Yeah, you too," he murmured as she closed the door behind her.

* * *

"I don't think Michael's having much luck."

Jo's voice from behind him made Dean jump slightly and he twisted around to look at her.

"What?"

She moved to the chair beside him, and made a small gesture across the room, where Michael was talking to Alex.

"He's been trying to hit on her for the last hour, and don't tell me you haven't been watching because I know you have," she said, passing him a cold bottle of beer.

"Where'd you get this?" he asked, looking down at the bottle.

"Please, you think my mom wouldn't stock up at every intact bar we passed on the way here?" she said, opening her own. "She's got crates down in the basement."

He smiled and twisted the top off with a shrug, swallowing a mouthful.

"Renee said that this was her place, originally," Jo continued, her gaze on the dark-haired hunter who'd trapped Alex in the doorway to the hall. Dean looked back at them, nodding noncommittally.

"Yeah."

"She just agreed to let you guys stay?"

He flicked a look at her. "I think she realised that it was going to be a mutual benefit."

They watched as Alex slipped past Michael and head toward the kitchen, Michael looking after her for a moment then walking away.

"Crash and burn," Jo commented.

"Looks like," Dean agreed, looking around at her. "How did the hunting go yesterday?"

"Not bad," Jo said. "We saw a lot of tracks, deer coming and going, four sets of wolf prints, some small game."

"Who went?"

"Ty, me, Dominique, Liev, Ben, Taylor, Duncan and Mark."

"How'd they handle it?" He leaned against the table, finishing his beer and setting the bottle down.

"They were alright, actually," Jo said, thinking back over the morning. "Excited, of course, so they were noisy, but they settled down and I think they'll get better pretty quick."

"Good."

"When we go to Wichita, it'll be just hunters, won't it?" Jo frowned at him.

"We'll see," Dean hedged. He wasn't sure who he wanted on that job yet, and he wasn't sure who needed to stay here, keep the camp safe. "Why're you so hot to go?"

She looked away, chewing at her lip. "It was a lot worse than Colorado. That was just … people being afraid, you know. This was … deliberate, cruel … evil."

He knew what she was talking about. He and Bobby had talked to Ellen.

"I've got no use for vengeance, Jo," he said firmly. "I need people who'll stay on top of their feelings, not let it affect them."

She turned back to him, her mouth opening in protest. He held up a hand to forestall it.

"Just listen for a moment, what we're talking about here isn't hunting a few demons or taking down a spirit or some monster," he said, hardening his tone deliberately. "This is turning into a war, and we don't have the numbers to attack directly, so the best we can do will be sneak attacks, guerrilla warfare, you understand me?"

She nodded, looking at the tension in his face.

"That means everyone does the job they're told to do, at the right time, in the right place, no stragglers, no acting on your own feelings."

"I understand, Dean," Jo said tartly. "And I can do it."

He inclined his head slightly, eyes narrowing as he looked at her appraisingly. "Maybe. You've got another eight or nine weeks to prove it."


	6. Chapter 6 Human Nature

**Chapter 6 Human Nature**

* * *

"Jesus, not venison stew again."

Bobby looked up from the book he was reading, glancing through the open doors to the dining room. He and Ellen and couple of the other hunters were in the living room, the books on the apocalyptic mythology surrounding them.

"It's food, Pete, be thankful you have it," Michelle said acerbically, ladling a spoonful into the bowl the man held and scowling at him. "Some of us still remember the feeling of not having any!"

"Just something different, once in a while," Pete grumbled, carrying the bowl to the table and sitting down.

"Feel free to take a gun and go and shoot us something different," Renee said crisply to him, putting another platter of bread on the table. "If you're that damned sick of it, go and find your own."

Bobby turned to look at Ellen, one brow raised slightly. Ellen shrugged.

"Cabin-fever," she said, rubbing the heel of her hand against her temple. "Bound to happen."

He looked back to the people sitting around the table, a dozen men who'd survived or been branded. He was having trouble keeping all the names with the faces, and he hadn't talked to any of them himself.

A high had come down from Canada four weeks ago, and had stalled over the mid-west, shifting eastwards day by day and dropping the temperatures into deep minus figures, freezing everything solid. Aside from feeding and caring for the livestock and bringing in firewood, there hadn't been much to occupy the people in Chitaqua for a while now. Tempers were fraying and the close quarters were having an effect on everyone, squabbles arising over the most trivial of things.

"What've you got in Revelations?" he asked her, closing the book in front of him with a snap.

"A lot of really vague crap," Ellen said, getting up and moving around beside him. "The Horsemen were released in spring, but with what's going on, there's no way of pinpointing where they are."

"Cas no help?"

Ellen sighed. "He says he can't feel anything, thinks he's human now."

"Perfect timing," Bobby growled sourly.

"I might be reading this wrong," she said, gesturing to the book. "War we dealt with before the release of the virus."

Bobby looked at the text in front of him. "_'And War will wreak conflict over the lands, destroying the crops and the fruits of harvest, leaving blood and suffering in his path_' … well, he didn't manage that," he said, looking at her.

"Right." Ellen tapped the page. "And Famine should've followed War, in the fall, to glean everything so that by winter, people would be starving."

"Think Famine's running slow?"

"If he had to destroy what wasn't wrecked by War, maybe. It's a big world." Ellen closed her eyes. "We didn't hear much of what was happening in other countries, Bobby, maybe War had more luck in Europe, the Middle East … they were already unstable when this started, and the virus can't have helped the situation."

"But you killed War before he could get going here," Bobby said slowly, nodding to himself. "So Famine was on the back foot when he arrived."

"The question is, what does that mean for us? This winter will have done the job almost as well as War could've. We harvested a lot of the food, but most of it must have been left."

"We'll have to see what re-seeds when things warm up," Bobby agreed. "But we can count on Famine moving around at that time too."

"And if Famine was delayed, then what about the other two?"

"Pestilence follows Famine because people stop caring about looking after themselves when they're starving, in the normal course of events," Bobby said thoughtfully. "Most of the dangers of the dead will be gone now, but the shutdown of everything that people used to have to keep their water supplies clean, sanitation and so on, all of it'll take is one hot summer and we'll see a lot of diseases cropping up around the cities, and the bigger towns. Cholera, typhus, dysentery … they're all killers on a weakened population."

"Damn, you know how to make a girl feel good, Singer," Ellen said dryly.

"Might not happen, but the situation is right. The croaties have been eating bodies, I'm guessing they're not all that careful about what they're drinking either, that's going to add to what they can do if they get into a city that Lucifer has been rebuilding – and depending on which disease – virus or bacteria, airborne, water-borne or closer contact – it would only take a few to infect the population," he said, with a shrug.

"No doctors, no hospitals, I wouldn't even know where to look for vaccinations …"

"Right. So we're careful when we go in to rescue people," Bobby said tightly.

"What about these?" Ellen looked down at the ancient bible sitting between them again. "The return of the Whore of Babylon?"

"Another seal," Bobby said, skimming over the text. "War was the second seal, Famine the third. Death is the fourth seal. When the fifth seal is broken, the witnesses and martyrs to God's Word are raised."

"God, Bobby, what does that mean?"

"No clue," he said, reading further. "The sixth seal turns to the sun to sackcloth and the moon to blood. And releases the Whore."

"And the purpose of that?" Ellen asked distractedly, bending close to him to read the text. "_'And upon her forehead was a name written, Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth_.'"

She shook her head. "What do you make of that?"

"The mother of sin and the mother of monsters," Maggie said in a low voice from the end of the table, leaning on it as she looked at them. Bobby and Ellen looked at her.

"And that means?"

"Means you're going to have a hell of a time dealing with people trying to kill each other and an uprising of all the things we usually hunt, when that seal is opened, Bobby Singer," she said, sitting down opposite them. "The Whore will go from place to place, and everywhere she goes, she will turn the people living there, either to commit sins that will take their souls to Hell, or to turn them into monsters that will overrun the country."

"Where'd you hear that?" Ellen asked, feeling a shiver run up her spine at the older woman's chilling words.

"Fourth century version of the Qu'ran," Maggie said, leaning forward toward them. "In the Israeli Museum, they have a good selection of ancient texts in the Shrine of the Book."

She leaned back. "But there'll be a lot of other things to worry about before we get far."

"You think?" Bobby looked at her sourly. "You find any answers to the signs over there?"

She shook her head. "Not many, no. I was scouting the place to see if I could get my hands on a few of the older documents, a couple of years ago now, when the demon population quadrupled, but the security was too good. I did find a reference to an order of scholars, though, going back a thousand years. They were supposed to have had a library with the answers to a lot of things."

Bobby's mouth twisted up in a humourless smile. "_Litteris Hominae_? Maggie, they were a myth five hundred years ago. No one's ever found any sign of them since the sixteen hundreds."

"I thought so too," Maggie said. "Until I found that someone had managed to lift a few of the very old manuscripts from the Shrine, a few weeks before I got there, and when I checked into it, I found a trail leading back to the States before it disappeared."

"And you think the trail was left by a man who belonged to the order?" Ellen's brows rose. "On what basis? Could've just been a collector, there are – there were – a few around."

Maggie nodded. "True. But I met him before he vanished. He was waiting for me in Chicago and he told me that he belonged to the order. He was wearing a pin, with the Star of Solomon wrought into it."

"Custom jewellery's not that hard to find," Ellen said, looking at her doubtfully.

"I know," the older woman said with a shrug. "And I can't prove he was or wasn't, one way or the other. But if he was …"

"If he was, he's probably dead now, along with most other folk," Bobby said impatiently. "And we're still no closer to figuring out what to do about what's coming."

* * *

Duncan stood by the corner of the barn, hands clenched into fists as he watched the two figures in the gloom of the interior, his lips thinning out listening to Alanna's whispered laughter.

He turned away as the conversation ceased, stalking furiously back up to the house, knocking into Father Michael as the priest walked with Dean down to the church.

"Duncan!" Father Michael turned and the boy stopped, staring at the ground.

"Sorry, Father," he grated, and started walking again.

"Duncan, what's wrong?" Father Michael called out, and Duncan shook his head, hitting the porch steps and starting to climb.

"Nothing!"

Dean watched him walk into the house, slamming the heavy door shut behind him, and looked at the man beside him. "What brought that on?"

"I don't know," Father Michael said slowly, staring back at the house. "He's usually a happy kid." He sighed and turned back to the path. "Of course, there are a few tempers fraying at the moment, which is what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Yeah, well, there's not much I can do about the weather, padre," Dean said, falling into step beside the priest.

"I know, but you know what they say about idle hands."

Dean snorted softly. "I think the devil's screwing us around already, Father."

"Four people have come to me in the last three weeks, Dean," Father Michael stopped by the church and turned to him. "Angry, jealous, lustful … do you know how long it's been since anyone actually asked for confession? These people know that they're losing it, they need some help."

Dean looked at him. There'd been a few more arguments in the camp over the last few weeks. Hank and Yuri had nearly come to blows over putting a tool back in its place, he remembered belatedly.

"I hear you, padre," he said, looking back at the house. "I'm just not sure what I can do about it." He looked past the priest to the church. "You can't run basket-weaving classes in there or something?"

"I could but make-work is often more insulting than idleness," Father Michael said. "They need something real, to learn or to do, or we're going to have more trouble than we can deal with, I think."

* * *

Dean walked slowly from the church to the cabins on the western side of the camp, feeling his breath crystallising against the thick scarf wrapped around his neck, thinking about what the priest had said.

Make-work was bullshit and he'd known it as soon as it came out of his mouth. Michael was right, they needed real things to do. Or learn. He looked up at the cabin he was heading for, hurrying a little as a thought blossomed.

Rapping hard on the door, he heard a dull voice inside. "Come in."

He pushed open the door and looked around, seeing the angel sitting motionless on one bed, staring at the wall.

"Cas, what're you doing?"

"Nothing," Castiel said in a monotone.

"I can see that," Dean said, walking over to the other bed and sitting down. "Why?"

"I've done my perimeter check," the angel said, turning his head stiffly to look at him. "What else is there? I'm useless now."

"C'mon, man, you're not useless," Dean said, feeling his stomach drop at the thought of having to bolster the angel's self-confidence as well. "Actually, I dropped by to see if you had time for a project."

"As you see."

"Good, well," Dean paused, looking around the cold, dim cabin. "You need to work on your people skills anyway, come up to the house."

"And do what? Stare at the walls there?"

"No. I need you to teach our ever-growing population about demon traps, angel wards and sigils, everything you taught me and Sam."

"What?" He turned to look at Dean, an expression finally lighting his face. "Those things, they are the secrets of Heaven –"

"Yeah, well, Heaven chucked you out, so unless you signed some kind of confidentiality contract, you don't have to answer to them anymore, do you?"

"You have a point, I suppose," Cas said reluctantly. "Who am I supposed to be teaching?"

"All of them," Dean said, getting up and walking to the door. He opened it and waved a hand toward the main house. "You finish the perimeter run with Chuck, you go down and Lisa or Ellen will have a bunch of people for you. Small groups, all day."

Cas got up slowly, walking across the room and baulking at the doorway. He stared uncomfortably at the man standing there. "Dean, I don't think –"

"Doesn't matter," Dean said, pushed him out, pulling the door shut behind them. "Do you good, do them good, help all of us. End of story."

Lisa could handle this, he thought, walking beside the angel down to the house. What else?

* * *

Lisa took Cas' arm and started him with the school-age children first, all sitting around the table, clutching pencil and notepads and drawing out the symbols as the angel did.

"Art class?"

Dean turned around to see Boze and Maurice standing behind him. He shook his head.

"Wards and Guards, 101," he said shortly. "Need you guys to do something too."

He gestured toward the other end of the room, and they followed him as he walked away from the angel's group of kids. "How many we got who really know their stuff with explosives?"

Boze looked at Maurice and shrugged slightly. "Most of us know how to wire up –"

Dean shook his head. "No, I mean experts, who know it inside and out."

"Uh," Maurice hesitated for a moment. "Well, Franklin, he's ex-Army and the new guy, Mel, he was in bomb disposal in Iraq, did his tours and worked for bomb disposal in San Diego when he got back."

"Great, good," Dean said, looking around. "Go and get them. They're going to be teaching us, and whoever they think will take to it out of the civvies, everything they know."

"Dean, that's a hell of a lot of stuff," Boze said doubtfully. "I mean, it'll take months."

"Good." Dean looked at him. "We've got bored people here, and we've got a need for trained people down the line, perfect fit, right?"

Maurice nodded slowly. "I'll get Franklin, but you'll have to tell him he's under new orders, he's been happy as a clam just fooling around with his designs."

"No problem," Dean said decisively, looking around the big room. "They can figure out their schedules between them, and who's likely to be worthwhile teaching, but every hunter goes to class, got it?"

Boze nodded, turning away, Maurice heading in the opposite direction.

"What's going on?" Ellen asked, turning to watch the two men stride purposefully from the living room as she came up beside him.

He looked at her, a faint smile curving his mouth. This whole delegation thing wasn't so hard. "Just allocating new duties. I need you to go and tell all the hunters that they'll be putting time in on some new skill learning, Ellen."

"What new skills?" she asked suspiciously.

"Enochian trap-making and how to handle high explosives," he said, the smile widening at her open-mouthed expression as he left her standing there. "Crap new world out there, and it's time we all skilled up."

He'd almost reached Bobby's office when he heard the shout behind him, near the bottom of the stairs.

"You just stay away from her!" Duncan yelled again, walking stiffly toward Billy Feldman. The young man had his arm around Alanna, the two of them staring at the approaching youth.

Billy was five years older and about eighty pounds heavier than the teenager and Dean swung around, taking the situation in at a glance as he headed for them. In the living room, Tim and Hank got to their feet and Ellen veered to follow them as she heard the raised voices.

"Grow up, kid," Billy sneered at Duncan, pushing Alanna behind him. "She picked me, so get over it."

Dean accelerated as Duncan launched himself at the older man, fists flying randomly. From the corner of his eye, he saw Tim burst into a sprint as well.

"The fuck you think you're doing?" he roared at them as Billy stepped back and clocked Duncan on the cheekbone, knocking the teenager down and into the wall.

Tim reached the young man first and ducked a wild haymaker from Billy, stepping close and jabbing with his right into the young man's abdomen. Billy's air rushed out of his lungs as his diaphragm compressed and he sat down in the hall rapidly.

"What the hell is going on here?" Dean hauled Duncan up, shoving him to one side.

The boy looked down at the floor, his cheek bright pink, the skin scraped off from the blow. Billy wheezed as Tim and Hank grabbed an arm each, pulling him to his feet.

Ellen stood next to Alanna, glowering at her. The girl was sixteen, street-smart and entirely too aware of her own looks, and she'd been expecting some trouble around her at some point, the desire to exercise the power of her developing sexuality too much to resist.

Dean looked from Duncan to Billy, neither of whom were meeting anyone's gaze. He glanced across at Alanna and saw Ellen's sour expression, nodding slightly in acknowledgement of the problem.

"Alright," he said to the girl. "Pick one. Don't play them against each other just because you can."

Her mouth twisted up to one side slightly and he suppressed the desire to smack the smile from her face, seeing Ellen's face tighten, possibly with the same impulse.

"I mean it," he growled at Alanna. "You pick one now, and they'll live with it, or you're going to be living with Father Michael and learning to be a fucking nun!"

With a dramatic sigh, Alanna sidled across to Duncan. Billy looked at her in disbelief.

"This isn't summer camp," Dean said sharply, getting the younger man's attention. "It's not let's-pretend or make-believe or some fucking teenage romance! You make trouble again and you're gonna wish you were in a Kansas slave camp, you understand me?"

He looked from Alanna to Duncan to Billy, his face hard and cold and implacable. They nodded uneasily.

"Get out of here."

Ellen raised a brow at him, and he nodded at the tacit question. She followed Alanna and gripped her arm, diverting her to the stairs and marching her up them. Dean looked at Billy, his mouth curving down in disgust.

"You think it's a good idea to muck around with a chick like that?" he asked him shortly. Billy shook his head, his gaze on the floor.

"You think it's fair to go one on one with a kid five years younger and half your weight?" Dean continued, glaring at the young man. "You're on barn duties for the next week. Report to Alex now."

Barn duties – cleaning the stalls twice a day, feeding the animals three times a day, checking their water, pulling down the hay and straw, was regarded as the worst of the rostered chores. Billy's face screwed up for a moment before he lifted his gaze and saw Dean's expression and he hurriedly smoothed it out, thinking better of arguing about it. He nodded abruptly and walked down the hall, toward the kitchen.

The three men watched him go, Tim turning to Dean with a one-side grin as he disappeared around the hall's corner. "Think it'll sink in?"

Dean shrugged, trying to shake off the anger that was still pounding in his blood. "I doubt it."

He turned to look at Duncan, saying to Hank, "Tell him to go see Renee and get that scrape cleaned."

Hank nodded and Dean walked across the hall, turning for Bobby's study, aware of the silence that filled the room, of the eyes that were on him. Well, if they'd wanted to know who was in charge, now they knew, he guessed, pushing open the door to the office and walking in.

Bobby looked up. "That you I heard roaring away in there?"

He nodded, dropping into the chair on the other side of the desk. "Didn't sign up for this crap, Bobby."

"Crap comes with the job, Dean," Bobby said wryly. "Maybe it'll make everyone else think about it."

"Padre says there're a few discontented people floating around."

"Yeah, we got grumblers," Bobby agreed, leaning on one hand as he looked at Dean. "Hopefully nothing worse."

"Yeah."

"Anyway, we ain't been sitting on our hands, and you need to know what's coming," Bobby said, pushing the pile of notes he'd been working on across the desk. "'Cause it ain't fun."

* * *

Dean walked down to the kitchen when he'd finished with Bobby. He was looking for Alex but stopped as he saw Duncan standing by the sink, morosely drying dishes.

Walking over to him, he leaned against the counter and looked at the boy. "Listen, word to the wise, chicks – especially young chicks – they dig the whole having guys fight over them thing."

Duncan glanced at him, then back down to the plate he was polishing. "Yeah, I'm kind of getting that."

"Best thing to do if she pulls that trick again is just ignore it."

"Then she'll be with someone else," Duncan said unhappily, turning the plate over in his hands. "How's that help?"

"Look at this way," Dean said, exhaling noisily as he looked at him. "Do you want to be with a girl who wants to see you beaten to mush by another dude? Or do you want to be with someone who just wants you?"

Duncan stopped drying, staring down at the plate. Walking out, Dean hoped the thought might have a lasting effect on the kid. He wasn't sure it would.

Lisa stopped him as he walked down the hall.

"I've come up with a schedule for Cas, but he's arguing that it doesn't leave him enough time to do the perimeter run," she said, her hand resting on his arm.

"How many classes is he doing?"

"Two in the morning with the kids, two in the afternoon with the adults and one after dinner with the hunters who don't know the stuff," she said, holding up a piece of paper.

"Cut the one in the evening, hunters can sit in on the afternoon sessions," he said, not looking at it. "You seen Alex?"

"No, not since this morning," Lisa said, her voice hardening fractionally. "She was down at the barn."

He nodded and started to turn away, and she tightened her grip. "Dean, I haven't seen you all day, you're not going to spend the whole night down here talking to everyone, are you?"

"That's what I supposed to be doing, you know," he said, as patiently as he could. "I've spent the day fire-fighting people's tempers and relationship disasters, I'd like to get some of the real problems fixed before today turns into tomorrow."

"How 'bout some fire-fighting in our relationship before _it_ turns into a disaster," she said quietly.

Looking down at her, he let his breath out slowly. "This won't take long."

She let her hand drop and turned away from him, heading for the stairs. He watched her as she began to climb them for a moment, wondering if he was doing any of this right. And since when had having sex become a duty that he thought of with reluctance? Shunting both thoughts aside, he turned back to the hall, walking past the kitchen to the long room that had been some kind of servant's hall.

Chuck, Ellen and Alex were sitting at one end of the long table. They stopped talking as he came in, and looked at him expectantly.

"Hey, did you talk to Bobby?" Ellen asked as he pulled up the chair next to her.

He nodded. "Yeah, not a great outlook for the next twelve months."

"Funny. That's what I said," Ellen said dryly.

Alex got up, and looked at Chuck. "I'll bring down the laptop, I haven't used it in months, but you can plug it in direct, don't worry about the battery."

"Thanks," Chuck said. She left the room and Dean looked at Chuck and Ellen, one brow lifted.

"Laptop?"

"Alex found out Chuck is a writer," Ellen explained. "She wondered if it would be a good idea for Chuck to put the hunter's journals, your Dad's, Bill's, Jim Murphy's, Bobby's and Rufus', into a coherent library or database, so that all the information can be accessed by everyone."

He looked at Chuck, brows rising. "You want to do that?"

"Aside from the perimeter run with Cas, and helping Alex out with the supplies inventory, I don't have much else to do," Chuck said with a vague gesture. "It seemed like a good idea to me, have all that lore, all the tricks you guys have learned, documented and accessible to whoever needs it."

"It's a fucking great idea," Dean said. "When you can start?"

"Tonight, if the laptop's going."

"Awesome."

"Did you want to see one of us, Dean?" Ellen asked.

"Uh, just checking in. We got a schedule from Franklin and Mel on the explosives thing yet?"

"Yep, Franklin's taking the hunters, more common terminology, Mel's going to talk to the others, including the teenagers, and see who has an interest. They'll start tomorrow," she confirmed. Another weight slid off his shoulders and he pulled in a deep breath.

"Either of you noticed anyone who's getting especially tense?"

"Aside from you?" Ellen smiled at him. He gave her a sour smile back. "No. Not especially."

"Ah … there might be something, I noticed today," Chuck said hesitantly.

"Who?"

"A couple of the new people, from Emmett's boat, seemed like there was a bit of tension between them and a couple of the guys from the people you brought in, Ellen."

"What kind of tension, Chuck?" Ellen looked at him, her eyes narrowing slightly.

"Well, this morning they were outside, about a third of the way up the drive, kind of yelling at each other, when Cas and I did the round."

"Dammit," Dean said, rubbing a hand over his jaw. "Which ones?"

"I think it was … um … Pete and Miles, yelling at Russell. One of the women was hanging around the edges of it, uh … Rose?" His face screwed up as he tried to remember the names of the newcomers.

"Perfect. Another damned fight over a woman," Dean muttered, half to himself.

"Maybe, maybe not," Ellen said calmly. "That guy, Pete, has been griping over half the things in camp."

"Trouble-maker?"

"Looks like," she said, shrugging. "Someone to keep an eye on."

"Anything else?" he asked, looking at Chuck. The writer was observant; he had to give him that.

"Well … look, this is just a personal impression, right?" Chuck prevaricated. "I mean, he hasn't done anything, hasn't made any trouble, just kind of gives me the creeps when I see him …"

"Spit it out, Chuck," Dean said tiredly. He'd take creepy feelings as an early warning indicator if it meant stopping trouble before it started.

"I think his name's Jake, not sure though," Chuck said, glancing at Ellen who shook her head.

"Must have come with Emmett's bunch, I haven't seen him," she said.

"Okay," Dean said, getting up. "Point him out tomorrow and we'll keep an eye on him. Other than that, anyone sees anything that might build up into anything, you let me know straight away."

They both nodded and he walked out, heading down the hall for the stairs. He was halfway up them when he realised he hadn't had the chance to ask Alex about moving some of the people into the attic space. He stopped, wondering if he should try and find her, and decided against it, continuing up. It'd been a long, weird-ass day and he wanted to bury it, if possible. He could ask in the morning.

* * *

The afternoon sunshine was bright but lacking in warmth as it came through the windows of Bobby's study, lighting up the desk and the maps that covered it. Dean leaned over the detailed town map of Wichita, eyes narrowed as they followed every road in and out.

"Hank said that the camps are on this side, so we need something major going on the other side of town to draw them all that way," he said, tapping the business centre.

"No argument, what'd you have in mind?" Bobby looked at the map, rolling an inch closer to the side of the desk.

"Rocket launcher?" Dean looked at him with a half-grin. "Franklin used to use them, says we should be able to get them at Selfridge."

"Franklin's gonna have to move fast enough to get out of the way when –"

The gunshot was loud and both men's attention snapped to the windows, Dean moving around the desk and looking out, swearing under his breath as he saw what was going on outside.

"Sonofabitch!"

He tore out of the room before Bobby could ask what happened, leaving the older hunter to wheel himself over to the window, manoeuvring tightly to be able to see down the drive.

Two men stood there, a small woman close by was crumpled up on the ground, the snow around her stained a bright red.

* * *

"Drop it!" Dean said, his auto aimed at the tall, thin man who held the gun as he came down the steps. The porch was already thick with people, more coming from the machinery shed and the barn, their faces white with shock.

"Renee!" he yelled back over his shoulder as he took in the colour of the snow around the woman.

"Don't move, don't even think about moving," he warned the men as he crossed the icy drive to them.

The man holding the gun dropped it into the snow, falling to his knees. Miles, Dean remembered the name after a second, from Emmett's load of survivors, one of the rescued slaves.

The other man was holding a long, curved knife, staring blankly at the fallen woman as if he'd never seen her before. Dean heard footsteps on the steps behind him and glanced over his shoulder, seeing Renee coming down, blankets and bandages in her hands.

"God, what happened?" She knelt in the snow beside the woman, wrapping a blanket around her as Maurice and Boze knelt down to either side. "Rose? Rose, can you hear me?"

There was no answer and she looked at the two men, getting to her feet. "Take her inside, just to the store-room off the kitchen," she instructed them briskly, walking away without another glance at the three men standing not ten feet away, still frozen in the same positions.

"Russell?" Dean looked at the man with the knife, snapping his fingers impatiently in front of him. "What happened?"

A little under six foot, Russell was broad-shouldered and thick through the chest, dark blond hair shaggy around his face. He turned to look at Dean, shaking his head.

"I don't know," he said, looking down at the knife in his hand and letting it fall. "Rose and me, we had a thing, Miles kept hitting on her … I told him I wasn't going to take it, thought we'd just slug it out, but he had a gun, and Pete …" He looked around for the other man, frowning slightly as he couldn't locate him in the silent, still crowd watching him. "Uh … Pete threw me the knife and then Rose … Rose must've stepped in …"

_Christ_, Dean thought tiredly. _Another fucking mess_. He gestured to Russell with the gun.

"Go inside." Turning to look around, he spotted Chuck and Cas standing at the bottom of the steps. "Cas, Chuck, get this guy inside, just take him to Bobby."

Russell followed the man and angel into the house, the people moving aside for them. Dean turned to Miles, who was kneeling in the snow, staring at his hands.

"Miles?" He moved closer, crouching to pick up the handgun and put it into his jacket pocket. "Miles, snap out of it."

Miles looked up at him, his face white. "I didn't mean to –"

"Yeah, get up," Dean said, his patience gone. Franklin came through the knots of people standing around.

"I got him, he can go into the cage until we figure out what to do with him," he said, one huge hand gripping Miles' shoulder and pushing him along. The man stumbled forward, his gaze fixed on the ground ahead of him.

Dean pushed the safety back on the auto, and lowered his hand, looking around at the men and women standing there. He didn't recognise most of them, hadn't had a chance to get around to look over those who'd come in with Emmett. Were they all feeling this way, he wondered bleakly? Like rats trapped in a small cage, ready to turn on each other?

"Anyone else going to pull this shit?" he asked loudly, focussing on their faces. They looked away from him, their gazes dropping to the ground. "You all made it here, some of you just barely, and now you're gonna fight about who gets what because you can't keep hold of that feeling for more than a few weeks?"

He watched their feet shuffle in the powder snow uncomfortably. Goddamned monsters were easier to understand than people, he thought furiously, looking at their faces. Now they got it, now, when someone was already injured, maybe dead.

He walked back to the porch steps, stomping up them and into the house, everyone standing there shifting back hurriedly to get out of his way. Didn't help, he thought, didn't help if they were terrified of him, they weren't looking out for each other, and that would destroy them all.

He found Renee in the room that she'd set aside for first aid, Maurice standing by, his hands and arms a raw red from washing them in boiling hot water.

"She going to live?" he asked from the doorway. Renee ignored him for a moment, bending over the woman on the table, her face hidden behind a mask, the thin latex gloves covering her hands red with blood. Maurice glanced at him and shrugged. They didn't know yet.

Dean turned away and walked to the window over the sink, staring out at the snow-covered cabins, and the forest behind it, fighting down the strong urge to get his stuff, get in the car and just go, leave this behind, this responsibility, this weight that was going to crush him if he had to see any more of what people could do without any help from monsters or demons or the devil.

* * *

Two hours later, Dean paced back and forth along the front of the sofa in Bobby's office, watched by Bobby, Rufus, Alex and Ellen.

"What the fuck am I supposed to do with them?" he asked, looked at them as he reached the end of the room and turned around.

"You have to try them, Dean," Bobby said quietly. "Jury of their peers."

"You mean a goddamned court?"

"Yeah." Bobby shrugged.

"In any other case, I'd be inclined to agree," Alex said slowly, her gaze going from Bobby to Dean. "But unless you want to feel what it's like to hang a man, I'd suggest that you decide the punishment and administer it without the people's endorsement."

"What do you mean?" He walked back down the length of the room and stopped in front of her.

She looked up at him, her face thin and drawn. "These people are scared and they're angry. Rose is dead, and they feel like it could've been any one of them. They'll take it out on both men if you give them the chance."

Beside her, Rufus nodded reluctantly. "She's right, it won't be a fair trial. Every one of those people have already made up their minds about what happened."

Dean looked at Rufus, then Ellen. "What do you think?"

"I think they're right," she agreed, making a small, helpless gesture in the direction of the main part of the house with one hand. "I know what my first reaction was, and I think they're acting on that same emotional response."

"So what do we do?"

Bobby sighed and pushed his cap higher on his forehead as he looked steadily at Dean. "You don't want to kill them, then there's only one other choice. Exile."

"Kick them out? You think that's any more merciful?" Dean looked at him, his expression doubtful.

"No, I don't," Bobby said wearily. "But it gives them a chance and it takes the life-and-death decision away from us, from the people here."

"We give 'em weapons? Food?" Dean looked at him.

Rufus shook his head. "They go out with what they came in with. And hopefully it's enough of a deterrent to make anyone else think twice about using the guns for killing each other."

"That's never worked all that well in the past," Dean said, bitterness edging his voice.

"Can't change human nature, Dean," Ellen said. "Two thousand years of developing civilisation and the same old factors still apply."

"Yeah."

* * *

"There were quite a few people who thought they should have had a trial and hanging," Lisa said softly, pressed against him in the darkness of the bedroom the following night.

His mouth tightened. A trial and a hanging, like there was no chance of acquittal. Alex had been right. He wondered who those people were, and then realised he really didn't want to know.

"They came around to the idea of sending them out, though," she continued. "I think everyone understands that there's no chance of just going to jail in this situation."

No, no chance at all that they would feed and look after someone who'd already betrayed the trust of the community. How many more decisions like this one was he going to have to face? What if someone stole food? Or fell asleep on watch? Or did one of a hundred things that could jeopardise the whole camp through some careless action that they wouldn't even have been arrested for in the old world? Were they going to need laws now, to govern these people? What the fuck had happened to common-sense, to their sense of survival?

He exhaled and closed his eyes, trying to shut it out, the images of the people standing silently along the snow-covered drive as Russell and Miles had walked up to the gate, neither man offering the slightest argument at their fate. No one had looked happy, but a lot of them had looked relieved when the gate had been shut behind them and they'd disappeared around the bend in the road.

"You did the right thing, Dean –" she said and he turned away from her restlessly.

"Lise, sorry but I – that's enough, okay? I don't want to keep talking about this."

"I just wanted you to know that –"

"Yeah, I know, I get it," he said, a thread of desperation creeping into his voice, forcing it higher. "I just … I want to sleep, okay? I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay," she said, moving back a little as he turned onto his side, his back to her.

He didn't want to even think about it, but it was there now, the precedent, and it would probably happen again. Hopefully not soon, but as their tiny population increased, he thought it was inevitable that it would happen again.

* * *

Alex glanced at her watch as she walked down through the gloomy twilight to the barn. The high was persisting and the air was bitterly cold, hurting with each breath she took. She did the evening feeds for the animals just to keep an eye on them and pick up any possible problems before they could get bad, and it was a habit now, the twilight walk through the crunching snow, the warmth of the barn and the comforting smell of the animals, dragging up her memories of childhood strongly.

Switching on the feed room light, she walked slowly around the pens, automatically checking water levels, hay racks and nets, bedding. The cows blinked at her in the dim light, large, dark brown eyes watching as she walked from stall to stall. In the enclosed hen house, on the other side of the broad aisle to the larger animals, there was some muted clucking as the hens shifted on their perches. The camp had ten goats, six pigs, ducks and geese, hens and three roosters, four cows and their weaned calves, a dozen sheep, all brought in overnight and turned out to browse through the daylight hours. They were used to her evening visits and stayed in their places, settled down for the night.

She was crouched, cutting open a bale of hay when she heard the soft slur of a foot, through the straw scattered over the barn's earth floor behind her, and she turned, looking up at the man, his frame a dark and indistinct mass against the light behind him.

Instinct made her swing the short knife she was holding at him, the same instinct that had driven her attack against the ghoul. She felt it hit his arm, cut through the coat he wore and slide into his skin. He hissed with pain, drawing back for an instant, and she rolled sideways across the floor, trying to get some distance between them. The instant was all that she had as he lunged forward, his closed fist slamming into the side of her face when she came to her feet, knocking her down. Her vision was blurring as her eye began to water, her head ringing with the weight of the blow and she gritted her teeth, forcing the roll of nausea back down as she swung the knife across her body at him.

She didn't ask who he was or what he was doing. She'd seen a man move like this before, seen it up close and she knew what he was doing here, what he wanted, what he would take if she couldn't get him off her, couldn't get out of there. She'd seen it before and the memory brought a frenzied strength and determination, wrapped in fear.

Slashing wildly at him, Alex skittered backwards through the straw, feeling the side of the pen against her back and levering herself up, her face throbbing, blinking furiously to clear her sight as he moved in front of her.

_Men are stronger than you are_, Tim's voice in her mind, when the hunter had been going through the moves to disable slowly. _Longer muscles, heavier, bigger. You can't let them get a hold of you._ She'd already known that.

The fist came out of nowhere again, too fast, and her head snapped back, hitting the post behind her as she felt her lips mashed against her teeth, blood taste filling her mouth. He grabbed her arm, twisting it up and spinning her around on the fulcrum of her shoulder, his fingers biting deeply into her wrist. She kicked backward, feeling her heel hit his shin, hearing the low grunt behind her and stamped down hard on the top of his foot. Abruptly her arm was forced higher, and she felt a sickening wave of pain as the bone began to slide out of the socket, the tendons holding it in stretching and burning as she was almost lifted off her feet.

The fist hit her again, low down in her back, under the ribs, and she felt herself go cold then hot for an endless second, her vision greying at the edges as her body registered the shock of the blow. The knife dropped into the straw and she felt her feet touch the ground as he pushed her against the side of the pen, grinding her face and neck against the timber rail and forcing her down with him as he crouched to pick it up.

_No. Not again_, she thought incoherently, feeling the prick of the tip push through her jacket and sweater and shirt over her ribs. _Not again, not again. Not again_.

"Don't move." The hoarse whisper against the side of her face came with a gust of foul breath and she froze as the tip of the knife pushed at her side a little deeper. "Don't move."

* * *

Rufus twisted the grease nipples and picked up the rag beside him, wiping his hands as he looked down at the generator. It needed regular maintenance, being an older model, but it was as tough as old boots, and it ran faithfully. He turned away to check the level of the diesel tank against the shed wall, noting that they'd need to refill it from the big drums that were stacked under it in a few days, but it was good for now.

He was turning back when he saw the shadow cross the snow down near the barn, a man-shaped shadow, visible for a moment against the bank of snow to one side of the building, then gone in the darkness beneath the trees.

Stepping back into the blackness of the wall behind him, he watched the shadow cross the thin line of light from the barn's door and saw it pull the door open a little wider, slipping inside and closing it behind.

In the part of his mind that was only a hunter, every alarm bell went off and he dropped the rag on the ground, running soundlessly down the path, feeling for the knife he carried in the sheath behind his hip. He stopped at the sliver of light that marked the edge of the door, and listened for a moment. The rustle of straw, a thump and a deep grunt told him pretty much everything he needed to know.

Coming through the door and around the corner of the first pen, he saw the man in front of him raise his fist, saw it hit Alex in the back of the head and come away bloody. She slumped forward and the man dragged her up by the hair, his knee in her back holding her hard against the rails. Rufus crossed the distance between them silently, his fist, weighted with the hilt of his knife, hitting the man precisely behind and below the ear. Both man and woman fell to the floor as the hit overloaded the nerve centre.

Jake Wilson, he thought, looking down at him coldly. One of the men from Emmett's boat. In the low light from the feed room, he could see the brand marked on the man's forearm, where his sleeve had rucked as he fell. The sight of it didn't affect him one way or the other. There were no excuses for some things. None at all.

Reaching forward, he dug his fingers in behind Jake's collar and dragged him backward, letting him drop and stepping across him to turned Alex over. Her eyelids fluttered and he turned her head gently, looking first at the raw and reddening skin down the side of her face and her rapidly-swelling and blood-rimmed mouth, then at the matted, soaked hair on the back of her skull. Her arm was hanging loosely, and he grimaced as he recognised the slackness in it, lifting her into a sitting position and rotating it carefully as he felt how far it'd been pulled. He drew it in close to her body, then pushed out hard, feeling the soft click as the bone slid into the socket. It would hurt for a while, but nothing like the pain of the dislocation, of tendon and muscle stretched out too far and held that way.

There was a grunt from behind him, and he eased her down into the straw again, getting up and looking around. The baling wire hung in a loose coil from a hook on the side of the barn, and he walked to it, cutting off several pieces and returning to the man lying on the floor. Wilson's eyes opened slightly as Rufus rolled him over and pulled his arms behind him, twisting the wire tightly around his wrists and moving down his legs to do the same to his ankles.

"Fuck you," Wilson muttered, eyes opening wider as he felt the bonds.

Some people were just born stupid, Rufus decided, his fist snapping out and hitting the man under the eye. He watched Wilson's eyeballs roll up, the eyelids drop closed and shook his head. He'd stay put until he was ready for him.

Turning back to Alex, he knelt in the straw and picked her up, straightening slowly and shifting his grip to carry her out of the barn and up to the house.

She wasn't heavy and he took his time, making sure of his footing on the snow-covered path. Not through the front door, he thought, looking up at the porch and turning for the basement door instead.

She came to as he opened the door, looking up at him dazedly, one eye swollen shut, the other rolling slightly.

"It's okay, you're okay," he said quietly, closing the door behind him. She shook her head.

"I can walk, Rufus." The words came out mushily, through a cut and swollen mouth.

He stopped and lowered her, keeping his arm around as her knees buckled slightly when her feet hit the ground, her breath hissing out and her eyes closing tightly.

"What's wrong?"

"My back," she whispered, her hand going around to her side. "Hurts."

"Stay still." He stepped around her, lifting the hem of her jacket and shirt, his jaw clenching as he saw the darkening and puffy skin over her lower back. "He hit you there?"

She nodded. "Is it – what is it?"

"Over your kidney, going to hurt for a while, but it should heal up," he told her, letting the jacket and shirt fall as he tightened his grip around her ribs. "I need to get Renee."

"No."

"Alex, she needs to look at you," Rufus said. "You're – you need some attention."

"No." She shook her head obstinately. "I just need to get to my room. Lie down. Rest."

"You –"

"No."

He sighed. "All right."

"I'll be fine, just … go and do whatever you have to do," she said, leaning against the wall, breathing deeply.

He looked at her for a moment. "I have to tell Dean and Bobby about this."

"No, please," Alex said, looking up at him. "Don't tell anyone. Please."

"Why?"

She looked away. "Please."

"Alex." He looked at her, seeing her eyes brightening in the dim light, and he knew why, knew he wasn't going to tell anyone. Memory stabbed at him, and he nodded, turning away.

"Go slow up those stairs."

"I will," she promised softly, pushing off the wall and hobbling across to the narrow, wooden staircase that climbed the back wall of the building and led up to the second floor. Her room was right across the hall from the door, she could make it there with no one seeing her.

Rufus closed the basement door behind him and walked back down the barn, struggling to keep his memories down and away so that he could finish the job without having to dig a grave.

* * *

Dean looked down into the trunk of the Impala, his eyes adjusted enough to the gloomy interior of the shed to be able to see everything in it. He replaced the two shotguns he'd just cleaned and picked up the crossbow, drizzling a little oil over the cranking mechanism. It was a bit anachronistic, not one of the new ones, a simple but powerful weapon that could punch a steel-headed quarrel through a Second Chance vest as easily as through metal.

"Dean?"

Lisa's voice was tentative as she stood in the doorway, looking around for him. He put the crossbow back and closed the trunk, turning to look at her.

"Yeah, here."

"We seem to be missing someone," Lisa said, taking a few steps into the shed as she saw him. "Jake Wilson."

"Missing? What do you mean, missing?" He frowned at her, the name catching at him though he couldn't remember where he'd heard it.

"Missing. Gone," Ellen said more forcefully from behind Lisa, stepped past her and looking at him. "Absent without leave. Disappeared. Can't be found anywhere in camp."

"You think he left? Rona and Ty were on guard last –"

Ellen shook her head. "No, he didn't leave through the gate, none of the guards have seen him, I asked there first."

"Isn't he the one that Chuck mentioned?" he asked her. "I thought we were keeping an eye on him?"

She nodded. "I sent Risa to look for him this morning, and she couldn't find him. He was bunking down with Liev and Matt and they say he hasn't been to the cabin for two days."

"Two days?" He gestured impatiently at the doorway, following the women outside. "Who saw him last?"

"I don't know," Ellen said, glancing at Lisa.

"Renee said he hasn't shown up for meals since Monday night," Lisa told them. "Were we supposed to be looking out for him?"

"Yeah," Dean muttered, striding away from them, back to the house, slowing a little as his foot skidded out on the icy surface just beneath the latest fall of snow.

Two days, he thought as he ran up the porch steps and into the house, heading for the office behind the kitchen. A personal disagreement gone wrong? Sneak attack from the outside? Without anyone being aware of it, he checked that thought, highly unlikely. Alex kept tabs on the new people, along with Lisa and Michelle; she might know something they didn't. He slowed as he realised he hadn't seen her around for the last day or so either. The nerves at the back of his neck prickled faintly.

Chuck and Renee looked up as he pushed through the door.

"Where's Alex?"

"In her room," Renee said, frowning at his peremptory tone. "She said she had a cold, didn't want to spread it around."

He nodded and turned around, going back up the hallway and up the stairs.

There weren't that many places to get out of the camp unnoticed, he thought as he walked to the door. Around the lake shore, although with the ice, that was a risky proposition at the moment.

Stopping in front of the last bedroom door, he knocked. There was no answer and he turned the knob, pushing it open and taking a step inside.

The room was dark, the curtains drawn tightly over the windows, the furniture little more than indistinct shapes in the gloom. He heard a shuddering indrawn breath from the bed and walked slowly over to it.

"Hey, Alex, sorry to –" Dean said as he stopped beside the edge of the bed, looking down at the heaped pile of covers.

"You okay?" he asked, crouching low as he heard her hissing exhale, saw the shiver of the bedding over her.

"Fine," she said in a hoarse whisper, the words slurred and thick. "Just a cold."

He could just make out the side of her face, pale against the pale pillow as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. His eyes narrowed, registering slowly that the shape was wrong, even pressed against the pillow. The prickle got stronger and he reached out for the lamp on the nightstand, slapping the switch fast.

The light was bright. Alex squeezed her eyes shut, and Dean squinted slightly as he looked at her face under the unforgiving glare.

Over her forehead and the exposed cheek, there were grazes, scabbing over and red around the edges. He could see her mouth clearly, the long split on the upper lip, both lips distorted and swollen and a dark red. Her eye opened slightly, looking at him through almost-closed lashes.

He reached out, his hand arrested mid-air as he saw her flinch back against the pillow, his stomach turning over lazily, a slow roiling sensation that sent a wave of nausea right through him. Moving more slowly, he touched her chin, turning her face toward him.

The other side, the side that she'd hidden against the pillow was mottled black and blue, the eye swollen shut, the cheek and temple still puffy under the bruising. Letting her go, he watched her hunch tighter, the gleam of moisture squeezing out from beneath the long dark blonde lashes, wetting her cheek.

"What happened?" he asked, very softly, knowing some of it, maybe most of it, needing to hear it confirmed out loud. "Alex? Who did this?"

She didn't answer and he stood up, turning off the lamp and walking out of the room, closing the door carefully behind him. He walked fast down the hallway and downstairs, hitting the door to Bobby's office with the palm of his hand and knocking it open.

Rufus, Ellen and Bobby were sitting around the desk. He looked at them, unaware that his face was stony with barely-contained anger.

"Ellen, Alex needs some medical attention, get Renee," he snapped at her, waiting till she'd left to look at Bobby.

"What happened?"

"I took care of it, Dean," Rufus said slowly, getting up.

"Wilson's missing, Rufus," Dean said tightly. "You kill him or run him off?"

"Ran him off, down by the lake," Rufus answered, glancing at Bobby. "He's gone."

"And you didn't tell me because –?"

Rufus stood still, dark eyes meeting Dean's steadily. "She asked me not to."

"What?"

"You heard me," the older man said, walking for the door. Dean's hand flashed out and he caught Rufus' arm as he passed, fingers curling around and gripping tightly.

"She asked you not to – that's all you got?" he said, brows drawn together.

Rufus looked down at the hand on his arm. "Yeah, kid, that's all I got." He looked at Dean. "Now, take your hand off me before you lose it."

Dean let him go and watched him leave, then turned to Bobby.

"What the fuck, Bobby? You knew, he knew, you don't tell me?" he burst out, staring at the old man furiously.

"It's done, Dean. Let it rest," Bobby said tiredly, picking up the glass of whiskey that sat on the desk.

"Bullshit, I'm gonna let it rest," Dean said, walking to the desk. "Did you think I wasn't going to notice someone going missing? Or Alex out of sight until her face healed up? Fuck you for your vote of fucking confidence in me!"

"Dean –"

"Don't you fucking well 'Dean' me, Bobby," he said, slapping his hand on the desk between them. "You think I wasn't going to go along with it? I'd want to do it different, give him another chance? I mean, what the –"

"If you just shut up for a minute, I can explain!" Bobby shouted at him abruptly. "Siddown!"

Dropping into the chair in front of the desk, Dean looked at him stonily. "Explain."

Bobby grabbed another glass and tipped the bottle up, filling it halfway and pushing it toward Dean. He refilled his own glass and set the bottle down with a thump.

"Rufus ever tell you about the falling out we had?"

Dean frowned, shaking his head.

"It was a while ago. In Omaha," Bobby said slowly, swallowing a mouthful from his glass and looking into the amber liquid. "Thought we were hunting something, but we were wrong. _I_ was wrong. Wasn't a monster, at least, not the regular kind. His daughter lived there and there'd been a few attacks, in the area. He asked for my help."

Dean listened, hearing the reluctance in Bobby's voice, an old, old pain that wouldn't rest.

"It was just a man," he continued, looking up. "Ripped his vics to pieces, after he'd raped and beaten them. Rufus told me it was just a man, I didn't believe him …" He shook his head. "He wasn't a hundred percent sure, I think, and we went with my plan, not his. His daughter was the next victim and we didn't find out until the next morning."

Dean tipped his head back against the chair, closing his eyes. It went a fair way to explaining Rufus, he thought. Explaining the despair in the dark, dark eyes that surfaced from time to time.

"She asked him not to tell anyone, Dean," Bobby said quietly. "And he couldn't say no."

Opening his eyes, Dean looked at him. "You should've told me, Bobby."

"Yeah, well, I got debts too, Dean, makes it hard."

* * *

The system moved up from the south, picking up warmth from the plains and the river that wound its way across the country, pushing warm air ahead of it and melting the snow and ice, the streams and rivers and lakes filling and overflowing, adding moisture to the atmosphere as the temperatures became first mild, and then warm.

The silence that had filled the woods for months was gone, shattered by the deep diesel engines and the sound of trees crashing down, metal blades scraping over rock as the machines pushed their way through the thawing soil, building mounds and banks and levelling the ground behind them.

Dean shifted down through the gears as the 'dozer grunted against the deeper level of frozen soil, his hands light on the controls that drove the machine, feeling his way across the ground. They'd levelled six sites so far, when the ice had begun to melt and the earth had softened sufficiently to cut through it, the growl and rumble of the heavy earth-movers echoing in harmony across the lake.

No one had said anything about the disappearance of Jake Wilson, although Lisa'd told him that people were whispering about it amongst themselves. They knew that something had happened, could put the pieces together for themselves when the days went by and Alex wasn't seen around either.

She came and went to the basement via the back stairs, head ducked, over-sized clothing hiding her. He'd watched her do it a couple of times. He didn't know what Ellen and Renee had told people, didn't care really. Alex hadn't looked at or spoken to him in two weeks and he'd been surprised to find that it worried him.

Rufus had withdrawn a lot as well, keeping to himself in his cabin, taking on more of the night shifts at the gate, doing the perimeter runs with Cas as Chuck got more and more involved with the transcriptions of the journals, and other texts that held vital information on hellspawn and monsters and the things that they hunted. The older man hadn't met his gaze for a week, avoiding conversation, avoiding chance meetings. It seemed better now, Rufus had actually stayed in Bobby's office yesterday when he'd come in, looking at him again, a warning look in the dark eyes to not even think about asking or talking about it. He could live with that.

The roads were clear again, torn up a little more by the winter, cracked in the deep freeze. No one was going to come and repair them so they drove around the worst parts, and he checked the shocks and suspension on all their vehicles, teaching some of the kids at the same time, what to look for, how to replace the parts.

Looking back over his shoulder at the ground behind him, he nodded to himself, driving the 'dozer down the small bank and stopping it by the side of the road. He pulled off the ear-protectors and climbed down from the cab, whistling to Maurice, who turned and walked toward him.

"Good job," Maurice said, looking over the flattened soil. "Liev and Matt'll check the levels then we'll peg and string it."

Dean nodded. "Got a pow-wow with Bobby, Vincent can make the corrections if you need them."

He turned down the drive and walked to the house. They needed to scout Kansas, and the roads should be clear enough to let a small group through. With the extra accommodation and training stepped up, he'd already decided that two groups would go, get intel on the rest of the state, particularly their ways in and out again, meet up near Wichita and check out the town together. They needed to sort out who'd look after the camp, start the supply teams going out again, build the cabins and rest of it while he and the others were gone.

He looked up at the house, seeing Ellen talking to Alex near the corner of the wraparound porch and slowed down. He'd asked her to get Alex to come to this discussion. He wanted to know what she thought, wanted to see her with people again. Even at this distance he could see Ellen's gestures getting bigger, Alex's head shaking furiously. He watched as she turned abruptly away from Ellen, walking fast out of sight behind the corner of the house, Ellen's shoulders dropping slightly in defeat.

"What happened?" he asked Ellen lightly as he climbed the porch steps and waited for her at the front door.

"She won't come," Ellen said flatly, walking into the house ahead of him. "Told me to tell you to find someone else to deal with the big picture."

"She say why?"

"No," she said, looking back at him over her shoulder and slowing down. "I think she's ashamed."

"Of what?" he asked incredulously, stopping in the hall.

Ellen shrugged. "Of what happened, of people knowing."

"She didn't do anything wrong."

"No, and she knows that. Doesn't stop the feelings," she said, turning to open the office door. "It's just the way people work."


	7. Chapter 7 Hungry

**Chapter 7 Hungry**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The morning started at six, with the high-pitched whine of an electric plane splitting the peaceful silence as the cabin crews started work. Dean opened an eye resentfully, rolling it to look at the clock beside him. Four hours. For the first time in a long time, he could've done another four with no problems whatsoever, he thought. But along with the plane, the band-saw was howling and the thump and clack of nail guns added an arrhythmic beat to the morning's cacophonous dawn chorus.

He pushed himself onto one elbow and looked across to Lisa, sleeping soundly through the noise, dark hair in a long spill over the pillow, the covers following the rise and fall of her body from shoulder down to waist and rising again to her hip. He waited for a moment for that sight to bring a feeling, a response inside, but it didn't and he sighed, rolling over and sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his hands over his face tiredly.

Two of the six cabins were already up, logs trimmed and de-barked, set into the frames and chinked with lake mud mixed up with concrete, roofs on and stone chimneys built. The new designs were bigger than the old ones, having two separate bedrooms, living and cooking space, rudimentary bathrooms installed with plumbing extended out from the main house.

Liev had taken charge of the project enthusiastically and Dean had handed it over to him with a feeling of relief. The man was a skilled carpenter by trade, and Matt and Terry, another two of the survivors who'd come in with Emmett, were both builders. Between them, the work was progressing fast and a lot of the camp people were learning to build and handle the tools, revelling in the feeling of doing something useful again, and the satisfaction of seeing their labour produce something tangible.

Rona and Maggie had gone out separately last week to look discreetly around. Both had reported that the country, at least as far south as the outskirts of Detroit, was empty. They'd also reported that a lot of the crops left standing the previous year were re-seeding. He wondered if there was anyone in camp who knew how to drive a combine, or if he'd be sitting on one come summer, harvesting grain and making hay.

He got up, pulling on a pair of jeans from the crumpled pile of clothes beside the bed, and walking down the hall to the bathroom. Stripping down, he turned on the taps in the shower. For the next couple of weeks, a hot shower would be a distant and unattainable dream. He stepped under the steaming spray and tipped his head back as it hit his back, luxuriating in the heat and pressure.

Bobby and Ellen would run the place. Ellen had told him that Alex had already suggested four new supply checks, having marked off and noted the farms they'd already tried, what was there and what had been left. He pushed aside the brief spasm of regret that she'd gone through Ellen to let him know as he rinsed the soap off, turned off the taps and grabbed a towel from the rail. Whatever was going on, it hadn't improved and he didn't know how to push it.

Franklin and Mel were not only teaching the principles of demolition and explosives but had begun to teach their respective students how to build them, everything from basic household ingredients to fuses and timing and wiring up remote detonators that they could still use radio signals to set off. He wrapped the towel around his hips and wiped off the mirror, scratching at the longish stubble that covered his jaw and throat and cheeks. The weather had been getting muggier in the last week, and he picked up a can of shaving cream and a razor, deciding he could do without the additional heat along his face if Kansas proved to be warmer than Michigan.

Taking Cas was going to hold up the lessons for all the people here on protection and warding but it couldn't be helped. Even almost human, Cas saw things that a person wouldn't, felt things that a person couldn't and for this op, he wanted the angel around, to feel the vibes of the small city, let them know where the concentration of demons were before they walked into them.

He drew the razor over the flat plane of one cheek, wondering absently who could take over. He'd have to ask Cas if there was anyone who'd been particularly good at understanding the basics, who could keep teaching while he was gone. Rinsing the blade in the running water and tapping it clean, he thought through what else had to be sorted out before they could leave.

In addition to the hunters, there were a few civilians who had the skills to keep going with the hunting trips into the forest, teaching as many as possible how to track and follow prey and keep out of sight and hit a moving target, and in the self-defence classes that had gained in attendance over the last four weeks. Depending on how many teams were needed for the supply runs, they should be able to keep those going. He was only taking six altogether, including himself, to Kansas. He watched his hand move slowly as the razor cut through the white foam and hair over the long stretch of his throat, fingers stretching out the skin there to make it smooth, the blade sharp enough to glide over it, not tugging at the stubble.

With Rufus, Cas and himself going into the state from the north, through Nebraska, he'd decided that Maurice, Jo and Ty could go south, into Oklahoma and check out the area around McAlester on their way up. If it didn't look too bad, they could grab a few things from there on the way, and be able to take out the planes at the airforce base in Wichita at the same time. The actual attack on Wichita was going to require a lot of planning, primarily to get the timing right. But that's what the recce was for anyway.

He cleaned the blade in the water, and ran a hand down one cheek. Smooth enough. Washing the rest of the foam off, he turned off the taps and dried his face, picking up his jeans and pulling them back on, leaving the towel over the shower rail to dry. They'd be gone for two weeks, maybe less. Things would be fine here until he got back.

* * *

"You're not going," Ellen said tightly, looking at her daughter. "I didn't bleed and sweat to get you here only to have you take off right into the heart of Lucifer's territory!"

"It's not your decision," Jo snapped back, uncaring of who in the big room heard them. "This is what I do, it's who I am now, and you don't get a say in it!"

Ellen stared at her, lips pursed, and turned on her heel, striding fast to Bobby's office. The door was partially open and Dean and Bobby looked up as she entered, both knowing what she was here for.

"Jo's not going," she said, gripping the door and slamming behind her as she walked to the desk and stared at Dean. "She's staying here."

Dean straightened up, looking at her steadily. "I didn't conscript her, Ellen. This is a volunteer-only job."

"I don't care!" She pulled a deep breath into her lungs, forcing herself to unclench her fists. "Find someone else. Risa's dying to go. Or Max."

"Risa doesn't have the experience or self-control to do this," Dean argued mildly, looking past her as the door swung open and Jo stormed into the room, slamming it shut behind her.

"Take it easy on the damned door, it didn't do anything," Bobby muttered, watching the pictures shudder against the wall.

"I'm going."

"No. You're not!" Ellen flicked a glance at her and back to Dean. "I mean it."

"You know what? This isn't my problem," Dean said, slouching onto the corner of the desk behind him. "Jo's competent, and she volunteered. You two want to fight about it, take it somewhere else."

Ellen glared at him. "She's not experienced enough –"

"How am I going to get experienced if you won't –" Jo shouted over the top of her.

"Seems to me that Jo's done growing up, Ellen," Bobby said, his voice firm, cutting across the young woman's protest. "It's her decision, right or wrong."

"Right!" Jo snapped, staring at her mother. Ellen looked at her, eyes narrowed, deciding the time had come to fight dirty.

"Jobeth, you should know this isn't the way to get his attention, he's not going to –"

Jo's mouth dropped open as a deep red flush rose up her neck. "MOM!"

"I'm just saying, that you're not going to get –"

Jo wheeled around to Bobby, her eyes flicking past Dean's. "I'm going. I'll be ready in the morning," she said loudly, drowning out her mother and spinning around. She marched to the door, yanking it open and closing it – gently this time - behind her.

"That was mean, Ellen," Bobby said softly. "Didn't do much good either."

Ellen stared at the closed door in frustration for a long moment and turned around. "You were supposed to back me up."

Dean shrugged, his face expressionless. "Not our department, Ellen. She's an adult. She can make her own decisions, whether you like them or not."

"If she dies on one of your missions, Dean, you going to tell me that you had nothing to do with it?" she asked him quietly, blinking back the tears that were pricking at the back of her eyes.

"No," he said, his face hardening a little. "But I've been watching her and I don't think she'll screw up, Ellen. I wouldn't have agreed to her coming along if I did."

"You don't think, there's a Winchesterism for you," she snapped, turning away. "Fuck you and your father, and you too, Bobby Singer."

They watched her walk out of the office.

"She's upset," Bobby offered when the silence had gone on a little too long.

"She's probably right to be," Dean said, shrugging and standing again.

"Jo'll be fine," Bobby said, looking down at the map. "You didn't make a mistake about that."

"None of us are fine, Bobby," he said, turning back to the map and looking at it. "And if I did or not, we'll have to wait and see, right?"

* * *

Rufus stood in the drive, looking over the contents of the trunk of the black car.

"Hi," the voice was warm and deep, the single word rich with nuance and he peered out from behind the car, looking at the tall, slender woman who leaned casually against the rear panel, smiling at him.

"Hi," he said warily, picking up his kit, dropping it into the trunk and closing the lid. "Help you?"

"I'm sure you can," she said, lifting one brow slightly. "You're about to leave though, aren't you?"

"In an hour or so," he confirmed, leaning on the trunk and feeling twenty years drop off as he took in the interest in the dark eyes. "It's Dominique, isn't it?"

She smiled and held out her hand. "In the flesh."

Taking her hand, he was slightly surprised by the strength in the long fingers that curled around his own.

"Rufus Turner, pleasure to meet you," he said, smiling back and letting go. "What can I do for you?"

"Bobby asked me to give you this before you left," she said, pulling out a note from her pocket and handing it to him.

He took it, opening it and reading through it. "Thanks, let him know I will."

"I'll be sure to do that," Dominique said, turning away and walking back up to the house.

He watched her go, knowing that she knew he was watching, feeling a flicker of possibilities he'd more or less put behind him flux through him and vanish. She'd come in on Emmett's boat, he remembered, skinny, shivering with the cold, clutching a man's pea-coat around her and staring at everything with huge, dark eyes, the brands on her arms pale pink against the darkness of her skin.

Amazing what some food and security did for a person. Somewhere in her thirties, he guessed, filled out in all the right places and pretty sure of herself now. He wondered if the flirting had meant anything or just been an ice-breaker. The question sent a frisson down his nerves and he smiled at himself self-deprecatingly. If he made it back, he could find out.

* * *

Dean swore under his breath as he searched through the drawer, turning over the clothing in it, looking for the small leather drawstring bag. He heard a noise behind him and glanced over his shoulder, seeing Lisa push the door wide and walk in.

"Have you seen a small leather bag?" he asked, slamming the drawer shut as he turned around.

"It's in the drawer in the nightstand," she said, gesturing to it.

He stood still for a moment, recognition dawning that she not only knew about it, but that she'd moved it from where he'd left it. Looked through it as well? He pushed the thought aside and walked to the nightstand, jerking out the drawer and pulling it out, untying the rawhide string and pulling it open.

"What time are you going?" Lisa asked, walking to the bed and sitting down on the edge.

"Now," he said, tipping the contents of the bag onto his palm. There were only a few things he'd kept, things that meant something to him. One thing he wanted to take with him. He picked out his mother's ring and put it in his pocket, tipping the rest back into the bag and pulling the string tight again. Replacing the bag in the drawer, he shut it and turned to look down at her.

"Were you going to say goodbye?" Lisa asked lightly, looking up at him.

"Yeah, of course," he said, brows drawing together a little. "I won't be that long."

He sat next to her, slipping an arm around and pulling her close, his mouth brushing over hers as she tilted her face to him. She slid her arms around him, deepening the kiss until he drew away a little.

"Keep everyone occupied, okay?" he said, getting up. She nodded and he turned away, going to the door.

"Dean?"

He stopped, looking back at her.

"I'll miss you," Lisa said, looking at him. "I love you."

His gaze cut away, and he nodded, not knowing what to say to that. He couldn't say it back. He'd never said it back. Not to any woman he'd been with. Was it worse to say something else, as if he hadn't heard, or to just leave without saying anything at all? He didn't know. He didn't have time to get into a conversation about it either.

He looked back at her, nodding again as he turned away, going through the door and down the stairs. The timing of women had always astounded him. Conversations were opened precisely when he couldn't deal with them, couldn't ignore what he had to do. Months of time passed by where every discussion was ordinary, day-to-day, then the exact moment he had no time, had to be in the car and going, she dropped that bombshell.

He acknowledged the slight feeling of relief that was threaded through his exasperation, relief that he couldn't stop, didn't have to face that talk about her feelings and his lack of reciprocation for them.

Something to look forward to, he told himself sourly, going out through the front door and closing it behind him. Rufus sat in the passenger seat and Cas was staring morosely out the back window and he pushed the entire mess out of his head and thought instead of the route he'd take once they were through Grand Rapids and skirting Lake Michigan and whatever remained of Chicago.

* * *

_**Concordia, Kansas**_

Dean lowered the glasses and looked across the small clearing to Rufus who was crouched six yards away behind another tree.

Rufus tucked his glasses in his bag and shrugged. He couldn't see anything either.

"Cas?" Dean whispered, turning to look over his shoulder at the angel who was kneeling behind him, eyes closed.

"I can't feel a demon presence here, Dean," Castiel said softly, opening his eyes and looking at the hunter. "It feels completely empty."

"Good," Dean said, putting the binoculars in the small pack and straightening up.

Every town they'd passed through had been the same. They'd parked on the outskirts, walked in and had a look around before going back to get the car and drive through, Cas making notes in the back of the car on what supplies, if any, were there, what state the town was in.

Rufus straightened up as well. "We staying here for the night or do you want to keep going?"

"We'll stay," Dean said, heading back toward the car. "Probably be the last night of solid sleep we'll get for a few days."

The older man nodded and waited for the angel, taking rear automatically. Cas could shoot, his hand-eye coordination extraordinary for someone who'd never done it before, but he wasn't used to skulking around, as he'd called it two days ago, and it seemed to Rufus that the angel still felt that the power that had been his, that had gone, should have still been there, relying on the gun he carried only after he'd attempted to reach out for that missing power first. It'd resulted in a couple of near-misses for all of them.

They were eighty miles from Wichita and so far the trip had been more or less uneventful. A couple of groups of croaties, on both sides of the mostly burned out ruins of Chicago, three demons obviously scouting a military base in northern Indiana and a small nest of vampires in Nebraska had been all they'd come across.

Just over three hundred million people in the US before May 2010. He thought that maybe ten million of those might've survived the virus and the Horsemen and the devil's scourges and a record cold winter since then. And they were either in one of the five cities that Lucifer held, or hiding somewhere in the country, too shocked and afraid to find others, too aware of how quickly death came for the unwary now. It was a number that would drop further, he thought, remembering Bobby's explanation of the seals and the omens that signalled the end of days.

He looked up as the throaty rumble of the Impala's engine broke through his depressing musings and lengthened his stride, reaching the car as the angel opened the rear door, opening the passenger door and sliding in.

Dean drove into the town, cruising slowly in and out of the abandoned and broken vehicles, now rusting hulks, most of them, that littered the street. Near the end of the main street, a low, single-storey motel remained intact, only two cars in the slots in the parking lot, and he pulled in, driving around to the rear rooms and parking the car parallel to the rooms instead of nose in.

They checked through the place methodically and chose a family room, salting all the possible entrances and bringing their gear in. Dinner was from the box of c-rations, carried around and heated up on a small camping stove, followed by thick, black coffee brewed in a pot on the stove until it was practically syrup.

"Start with the base tomorrow?" Rufus asked Dean as they checked over their gear.

He nodded absently as he looked at the loads in each of the guns laid on the bed. "Maurice should be there tomorrow or the day after. Camps are in the industrial area on the other side of the airport. We can take a look at the western side after that."

* * *

_**McAlester, Oklahoma**_

"Looks quiet," Ty murmured, lying prone on the small rise above the plant.

"Not empty," Jo said from beside him, the binoculars held to her face moving slightly to the right.

"No," Maurice agreed on the other side of her as he picked up the movement in his own glasses and adjusted the focus. "Skeleton crew."

Jo lowered her glasses, thinking of the layout of the place, the buildings that they needed, the possibilities inherent in the situation, chewing lightly at her bottom lip as she looked across the wide aprons of concrete parking lots to the big, prefabricated and brick buildings beyond.

"We'll have to split up," she said slowly. "Run a diversion on the other side, two of us going in this way to get what we need."

"Are we supposed to blow up this place when we've got everything?" Ty looked across at her.

"No," Maurice answered, lowering his glasses as well. "No, Dean wants to take another run at it just before the big push." He turned his head to look at Jo. "Short straw takes the hit and run."

She nodded, lifting her glasses again. "We need a head count."

* * *

Another five minutes before they made their round, Jo thought, lying flat next to the fence on the other side of the plant. She'd have twenty minutes before they came around again to draw out the trap and get into position.

"_Jobeth, you should know this isn't the way to get his attention, he's not going to –"_

Jo felt heat rise up across her chest, up her neck and over her face again, the memory of her mother's mortifyingly embarrassing words ringing in her mind. He hadn't seemed to notice, or at least, she thought, trying to shove the memory aside, he'd acted as if he hadn't noticed, treating her the same as always as they'd prepared to go the following morning.

A part of her had wanted him to raise it, she thought. To acknowledge it. But only a small part. The part that was still mostly teenager, still mostly a romantic.

She hadn't spoken to her mother from the moment she'd walked out of the office, not to say goodbye or anything. It was protectiveness, she knew, that's all, but it was long past time that Ellen Harvelle accepted that her daughter was an adult, with an adult's capabilities and responsibilities. And she should've known that her mother would play dirty if she felt pushed. It was one of her less appealing character traits.

Her attention sharpened as she saw the movement at the corner of the building and she thrust the personal musings aside, focussing on the two guards who sauntered across the concrete, looking around in a haphazard manner, clearly not worried about being attacked here.

They hugged the building and she saw where the best place would be to set the trap, where they would react and follow instead of looking around cautiously. Watching them continue around the lower buildings until they were out of sight again, she thought she had a very good chance of getting this done right and walking away afterward.

Easing herself up, she rolled onto her knees and picked up the light pack from beside her, slinging it over one shoulder and moving carefully down the gentle slope to the fence.

* * *

Six hours later, Jo sat on the broad bench seat of the M939 truck next to Ty, stripping and cleaning her guns. The traps had worked, the demons had been exorcised and behind her, in the five-ton cargo bed, they'd loaded everything that had been on Franklin's list and had room for extras.

"Where do you want to hide this load when we get near Wichita?" Ty glanced across at her.

"Blackwell, just before the state line," she told him, wiping down the gun and reassembling it. "We're supposed to be sneaking around, we'll sneak back out that way and go home through Illinois, the long, long way."

He nodded. Four cases of Stingers, twenty cases of the 70mm missiles that the MANPADs fired. Ten cases of grenades. Ten cases of mines and detonators. Thirty cases of ammunition. The truck was loaded and heavy to drive, but the small back roads were mostly clear and they'd seen no one on the way up north.

"You ever think of joining the army, back when, you know, things were normal?" Ty asked her, looking at the road ahead of them.

Jo shook her head. "No, too regimented for me. Hunting was what I wanted to do from the moment I first realised it's what my Dad did." She pushed a strand of hair back from her face, lifting her head to look at him. "You?"

"I thought about it," he said. "Didn't want to die in some foreign desert with my guts full of lead."

She smiled. "Much better to die on home soil with your guts ripped out by a demon, right?"

He laughed.

* * *

_**Wichita, Kansas**_

The rendezvous point was a farmhouse four miles south-east from McConnell Air Force Base. Dean faded back into the deep, black shadows of the barn as he heard the engine on the still night air. It was the dark of the moon and a thin cloud cover hid the stars, making what little light there was from the loom of the city to the west murky.

The car bumped its way over the pot-holed drive, and stopped next to the house. Whoever was driving had the sense to keep the lights off and if it hadn't been for the slight rise of the drive from the county road to the homestead, they would've been able to coast in, silent and dark. But that'd been the reason he'd chosen it.

He held the shotgun loosely, watching as three people got out, shadows against the darker shape of the house and walked slowly toward them, calling out softly as another two shadows came around the corner of the house.

"Maurice?"

"Yep, it's us, Dean," Maurice turned around, his hands held high and empty.

"Arms out," Rufus said shortly, holding a bottle and a couple of knives in his hands. Dean and Cas covered the three while they licked at the salt spilled on their arms, swallowed a mouthful of holy water and stood still for Rufus to lay the silver and iron blades on them. The tension between the two groups disappeared as none showed any reactions to any of it.

"Completely weird to drive at night and see the city lights, man," Maurice said quietly to Rufus, rolling down his sleeve. "How long have you been here?"

"Since this morning, had a pretty clear run in from the north," Rufus said, gesturing to the house.

"You get to McAlester?" Dean asked, following them up the porch steps, gun uncocked now and Castiel beside him.

"Yeah, piece of cake," Jo said, walking into the dark hallway and ducking under the thick blanket nailed to the doorway. Beyond it, the old-fashioned living room was lit by kerosene lanterns, a dozen candles standing on the bureau against one wall. She felt herself relax finally, putting her gun down on the table and stretching a little.

"We got a load, borrowed a five-ton truck and stashed it in Blackwell," she continued, turning around to look at him. "We can pick it up and go back through Illinois, same way we came down."

He nodded. "Everything on Franklin's list?"

Ty grinned at him. "And more. We really should take a couple of teams before they re-garrison that place."

"Probably won't need too much more," Dean said, setting the shotgun down and moving across the room. The windows and doors had all been blacked out. Cas and Rufus had already gone back to their posts, at the front and rear of the house.

"Not soldiering here, Ty," he continued. "Just picking the battles we can win."

Ty nodded, a little abashed at the mild rebuke. "Anything to eat?"

Dean gestured to the camping stove on a cupboard. "Help yourselves. Plenty of rooms but no lights anywhere but here."

"You want us to give us shifts tonight?" Maurice looked around the room.

"No," Dean said. "We got it. Get a good night's sleep, you'll need it."

Watching them, Dean thought of the load they'd commandeered from the ammunitions plant. If they had the ability to set off a good diversion on the other side of the city, and take out the planes that were still tied down at the air force base, they would be able to get most, if not all, of the slaves out of the city. Relatively speaking, that would be the easy part.

Hank had estimated the numbers between one and two thousand. He didn't yet have a plan of how to get that many across country to Michigan, or where to put them when they got there. There was the town, of course, but it was undefended and it would be difficult to set up really effective defences around it, despite being wedged between two lakes.

Figure it out later, he told himself, picking up the shotgun and walking out of the lit room. He crossed the dark kitchen, whistling softly to let Cas know he was coming, hearing the angel's attempt to whistle back with a slight smile. Letting himself out the back door, he moved slowly along the side of the house and into the shadows of the barn, walking around the perimeter of the farmyard.

* * *

Adjusting the field of the glasses slightly, Dean looked across the pale expanse of concrete. He could see people moving, chained together for the most part, in the thin, grey pre-dawn light. They were being loaded onto buses, shifted to wherever the day's work was, he guessed.

It put a time on the possibility of rescue. Either before dawn or after dark, when they were all brought back to the camps again. He chewed on the corner of his lip as he ran through the pros and cons of those two times. In daylight, they'd be hard-pressed to hide, but at night, the lights of their vehicles would give them away even more easily and with so many to get out, it wasn't like they couldn't use them. Even a good bright moon would invite accidents on a convoy that big.

He glanced sideways, careful not to move the glasses as Jo wriggled up beside him. The roof of the building on which they lay was the highest he'd been able to find, that was still a safe distance from the base and the airport beyond it. They had another hour, maybe, before the rising sun would warm the surface too much and they'd be too easy to see.

"The main offices of the base are where the demons are concentrated," she said, very quietly. "Looks like they're not using any of the other buildings."

"How many?"

"At least a hundred quartered there." She turned her head slightly, bright hair covered by a black cap. "All demons. No civilians, no slaves."

That would make it tricky, he thought sourly. And more through the rest of the city. They would need a hell of a diversion to drag them all away. He looked back through the glasses, brows drawing together as he watched the buses pulling out of the airport's lot and begin to disperse. The buses would be the easiest thing to use to get them out, he thought. They'd need drivers, good ones, but they could split up once they were clear of the city, send them out along the back roads.

"And how many aircraft?"

"Sixty-eight on the apron, possibly another twenty in the hangars."

Looking back at the air force buildings, he dragged in a shallow breath. This would only work if there was a way to really neutralise the demons, all of them, at the same time. At the back of his mind, a very faint memory stirred, and he reached for it, feeling it dissolve under his searching.

_Sleep on it_, he told himself. _It'll come._

There would be ways to do this, he only had to think of them. The numbers were difficult but not impossible, not by a long shot. And they had, or could get, whatever they needed, he thought.

He eased back from the binoculars and folded the small stand on them, shifting slowly around to put them back into the bag that lay beside him. Turning to look at Jo, he jerked his head slightly in the direction of the edge and she nodded, wriggling backwards as low as possible to avoid notice.

They slid off the edge of the roof, climbing down the metal gantry to the ground, keeping to the sides of the big industrial buildings as the sun rose higher. At the corner, Dean slid down with his back against the wall, watching the open lot around them for fifteen minutes before he rose again and crossed the bare ground at a run.

The cars were another mile away, on the outskirts of Augusta and Jo followed Dean through the tangle of small streets, houses, stores, back yards and alleys until they reached them. Rufus and Castiel were already there, she realised, seeing a dark hand against the curtain that twitched slightly in the house next to the two vehicles.

The door opened as they walked up, and Rufus closed it behind them when they'd entered.

"Going to be a tricky job," Rufus said to Dean without preamble, passing them a couple of bottles of water. Dean unscrewed the lid and swallowed half of the bottle's contents before he answered.

"Yep, but doable."

"Where's Maurice and Ty?" Jo asked, looking around and wiping her mouth with her hand as she screwed the lid back on her bottle.

"They were the furthest north," Castiel said. "It will take them longest to get back."

"We'll stay here today, and get around to the western side tonight," Dean said. "The free civilians and the higher up demons are supposed to be there."

"I think it will take more than one diversion to clear the area on this side, Dean," Cas remarked, looking down at the map that lay on the formica table in the small kitchen.

He nodded. "Probably three, but all on the other side," Dean agreed, looking past him at the map. "We'll know more about that when we can see what they're doing over there."

"Jo, you can take watch with Cas," he turned and said to her and she nodded, moving out of the kitchen and following the hall to a bedroom on the northern side of the house. Castiel returned to the small parlour between the kitchen and living room where he could see the street outside and the two cars.

Looking at the map, Dean thought of how many they would need. Franklin, probably Mel and Boze on the MANPADs to the west. The range was three miles but they'd need height to be able to see their targets.

"The Stingers are infrared targeted, aren't they?" Rufus asked diffidently as he stood on the other side of the table, looking down.

Dean nodded.

"Take out the power station, or at least give it a world of hurt, and they probably won't follow so readily."

"That's a good point," he said, looking at the power station marked on the map. It would also be a target that would draw most of them from one side of the city to the other. And it was in reach of the cover on the western side.

"We'll check the approaches tomorrow."

"Get some shut-eye," Rufus said. "Nothing's happening until Maurice and Ty get back."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Ellen walked into the room behind the kitchen, seeing Chuck bent over the laptop at one end of the table, and Alex going through the ledger of supplies at the other, chewing absently on the end of the pen in her hand.

"How's it looking?" she asked, walking to the table and sitting down.

"Four teams went out over the last two days," the younger woman said, looking at the map next to her. "Rona said that on both farms hers checked, the crops that weren't harvested last year have reseeded and are growing again." She looked at Ellen. "We'll probably be able to get away with that for another year, according to the books I've been looking at, after that, those fields will need fertilising and resting, and we'll have to put some sweat into seeding others to get the same sorts of yields."

"Well, we'll worry about that after harvest-time," Ellen said, looking at the maps. "How much further do we need to go out to find our ready-made staples?"

"Not sure," Alex said. "Those things will be out there, I have no doubts about that, but finding them, bringing them back …" She shrugged slightly. "I think it would be more efficient to send out two or three of the trucks, with a few of the hunters, in one team and send them right around the state to bring back what they can find in bulk. These shorter runs are heavy on time and our people for the amount they can find."

Ellen caught her lip between her teeth as she nodded. She'd thought that as well, watching the goods come in through the last week. She had Boze and Tim, both ready to work again, Rona, Risa, Emmett and Max, Vincent and Michael and probably a dozen of the civvies who were good shots, strong and ready to work hard.

"I'll check with Bobby, but I think you're right. We'll send out a big team by the end of the week."

Glancing briefly down the table at Chuck, Ellen turned back to Alex. "How are you doing?"

Alex looked at the open ledger in front of her. "I'm fine, Ellen."

At least she never wasted time pretending not to know what I mean, Ellen thought dourly. "Alex, I don't mean to press you –"

Alex looked up at her with a tight smile. "Sure you do, Ellen."

Ellen's eyes narrowed slightly. "We need you," she said bluntly.

"No. You don't," Alex said, closing the ledger and getting to her feet. "You just don't like having someone you can't predict around, someone who might go off the rails." She looked down at the older woman steadily. "I'm not going off the rails but I'm not like you."

Turning away, she walked out of the room, heading for the basement. From the other end of the table, Ellen heard Chuck's deep sigh.

"You keep pushing, Ellen, and you'll drive her into doing something stupid," he said quietly.

"She's wrong, Chuck," Ellen replied, turning in the chair to look at him. "We do need her, and I'm not going to just let that go. What happened could've happened to any one of us."

"But it didn't," Chuck said reasonably. "And we're both pretty sure that it's not the first time something like that happened to her."

Ellen leaned back in the chair. "Did she tell you anything else?"

Chuck shook his head. He was here most of the time, working on the journals. He'd gotten Alex to talk a little about herself, her past. Not much though.

"I think she came out here because she was running, Ellen. She had a plan for the place, but the real reason was to get away from Grand Rapids and to get away from people," he said. "And whatever it was driving her is still working its way through."

* * *

Alex crossed the basement floor, glancing at the rooms as she passed them, and started up the back stairs. At the top of the flight, she opened the door and checked the hall, slipping across it to her room when she saw it was empty, closing the door behind her and leaning against it.

Her heart was pounding and her mouth was dry, the usual results of a conversation with Ellen lately. No matter how well-meaning the woman was, she couldn't help trying to push for the result she wanted to see and Alex couldn't help reacting against that.

She pushed off the door and walked to the small desk under the window, sitting down in front of it and letting her head drop into her hands. The injuries had healed up, for the most part, the bruises barely visible, yellow fading out to a pale grey at the edges now. Renee had tut-tutted over her back, but she hadn't peed blood and the ex-nurse told her that was the main thing. It was still stiff and a bit sore in the mornings, but that was all.

Renee had also given her a bottle of pills, to take at night to get enough sleep. The nightmares had kept coming, a conglomeration of the various incidents, mixed in with her past and guaranteeing not more than a couple hours sleep at a stretch. The pills had worked, but they left her feeling deadened and dull in the morning and she didn't think it was worth it.

She could understand Ellen's concerns, she thought tiredly. The setup here was delicate, really, and a morose, withdrawn woman lurking around in the shadows didn't do much to inspire confidence in anyone. Lifting her head, she looked out the window, seeing the new, green grass pushing through, the mist of pale green leaves over the big deciduous trees between the cabins and the lake. It was spring and a time for hope, of a better future, a new life, and she couldn't fight her way free of the old one.

It might be better, she considered, if she left. Worked her way northward through the national forest and found someplace isolated to lick her wounds on her own, without worrying the people here, taking up their time, feeling their pity in every quickly-averted look, every whisper that followed her when she walked through the house.

Looking around the room, she wondered what she would need to take with her, what she could realistically carry with her. Not much food. She would have to hunt and fish and gather. Maybe north wasn't such a great direction, maybe west would be better, follow the roads through the farm land until she found a good place to settle down, perhaps on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Running away. _Again_.

It's what it came down to, she knew. She'd told herself that the camp was going to be new future but she'd known that it wasn't, not really. It was a place far from anyone she'd known, anyone who'd known her, where she could hide and be on her own and not have to think about any of it.

It was slightly ironic that running had saved her life, she thought now. Had she stayed in the city to the west, she'd probably have died months ago. She'd run because she couldn't stand the looks. The looks that had said if you'd tried harder, it never would've happened. If you'd been different. The look in the prosecutor's eyes when the woman had stared at her across the courtroom that said _it was all your fault_.

Rubbing a hand over her face, she tried to repress the shudder that rippled through her. Maybe it had been. She'd gone over things so many times now that she knew her memories weren't clear anymore.

It was all a lot easier to deal with when she was on her own.

* * *

_**Wichita, Kansas**_

"No go on the power plant, Dean," Maurice said as he poured a cup of thick black coffee from the pot on the stove.

"Why not?"

"We can take out the sub-stations easy, they're just across the turnpike, but the power generation comes from Wolf Creek, out at Coffey. It's a nuclear plant."

Dean smiled wryly. "What about cutting the power from there to here?"

"The sub-stations will do that anyway," Rufus confirmed. "No wonder Lucifer picked this town. Damned plant was probably just in safe mode the whole time."

"Have we got target coordinates for the sub-stations?"

"Yep," Maurice nodded, sitting down and cradling the cup between his hands. "And six targets to the north and across the river to light their fires and get them scuttling out of here when we need it."

"Good job," Dean said. "Mostly civilians at those locations?"

"Yeah," Ty said, nodding. "But the targets aren't homes. They moved a lot of the businesses to the same areas, save on gas, I guess, and it looks like we'll be able to hit them at dawn with a minimum of casualties."

"All the maps marked up?"

Jo nodded. "Finished transferring everything this morning," she said. "What do you want to do about McConnell?"

"Nothing right now," Dean said slowly. "This'll take a couple of weeks to put together, mainly the getting out of Dodge part. When we get back, we'll put it out of action."

He looked at Maurice. "How long were you thinking to get back to Michigan?"

"A week, thereabouts," Maurice said. "We have to pick up the truck, and we'll take nothing but back roads until we're through Illinois at least."

"We'll be going more direct," Dean said with a sideways glance at Rufus. "And straight through. Stay away from Chicago."

Maurice snorted. "Have all my life."

* * *

_**Emporia, Kansas**_

The turnpike had been blocked for miles and Dean had turned onto the smaller county roads as they'd left Wichita, heading north and east. He glanced at the sign by the side of the road, seeing that they were four miles out of Emporia, and swore as his gaze returned to the road in front of him as he took the bend and saw the mess of cars across the narrow blacktop, his foot stamping on the brake.

"What the –" Rufus picked up the shotgun from the seat beside him and cocked it.

"Blockade?" Dean asked no one in particular as he eased the car slowly toward the piles of rusting metal.

"Could be," Rufus agreed. "You want to go around?"

"Looks like we can get through there," Dean said, peering ahead. "Next turn off is ten miles back."

"Do we want to see what these people were trying to keep out … or in?"

"Cas, you getting any vibes about demons here?" Dean glanced in the mirror to look at the angel in the backseat.

"Yes," Castiel said slowly, his eyes closed. "A small concentration to the north."

"In the town?"

"I can't tell with that much precision, Dean," the angel said, opening his eyes again.

The black car slowed to a stop and Dean drummed his fingers against the leather-covered wheel, working through the pros and cons of going in or going around.

Beside him, Rufus licked his lips, looking down at his hands as he felt a faint tremble in his fingers. He swallowed slightly. In the back, Castiel looked out the window, wondering when they'd last eaten.

"We'll go through," Dean decided, and the car moved forward, weaving its way in between the two piles of smashed up vehicles.

"Not sure that's such a great idea," Rufus said, a thread of tension in his voice.

Dean glanced at him curiously. Rufus was a hard man to shake, but he'd heard something in his voice, some edge.

"What?"

"I don't know," Rufus said, shaking his head a little. "Just feels … wrong."

Dean's brows drew together slightly as he continued to drive along the narrow road. "Like a trap?"

Rufus shook his head. "No. Not really."

He pulled out the small silver flask he carried around, and unscrewed the lid, tipping the contents down his throat.

"The power appears to be on here too," Cas remarked from the back, looking up as the streetlights came on along the road.

Dean looked around, the back of his neck beginning to prickle slightly. "Probably on in a few of the towns around Coffey."

Aside from the original blockade, the streets were relatively clear, wrecks had been pushed to the sides of the road, a few sitting on the front lawns of the houses they passed. He turned from the residential road onto a larger one, and they saw the lit signs of a few businesses glowing in the thick, mauve dusk.

Pulling over, Dean stopped the engine. "We'll take a look around. Maybe there're a few survivors here as well."

"The demons are along there," Cas said, pointing across the front seat and up the road they were on. He frowned. "Not many, perhaps six or seven."

Dean's fingers slid inside his jacket, touching the bone handle of the knife sheathed there as he nodded. "Well, let's see what we can see."

Getting out of the car, they looked along the street. "Rufus, take that side. Cas, you're with me."

The man and angel nodded, Rufus crossing to the other side of the street. Dean moved to the inside of the sidewalk, looking into the lit stores that lined the road. There was no movement in them. He stopped in front of a shoe store, inside lights on and the green glow of the digital cash register shining innocuously, and turned the handle of the front door. It opened easily. He couldn't hear anything from inside.

With demons in the town, he thought that any croaties would have been pushed out already, but it didn't pay to make assumptions about the situation. He closed the door and turned back to the street, glimpsing Rufus moving slowly and steadily along the other side.

The diner was a few doors up, as empty and silent as the rest, overhead fluorescent lights illuminating the long red countertop, the empty tables and leather-upholstered booths along the walls. Behind the counter, a neon sign flickered slightly, advertising a well-known brand of soda.

But there were no people and no sound to indicate that anyone was hiding inside.

He'd gone another forty yards up the street when he realised that Cas was no longer following him, turning around and looking down the empty street behind him with a muttered curse.

Backtracking down the street, the shotgun in his hands swinging both ways along the street, he stopped when he came to the open diner doorway, hearing a clanking sound from inside.

He looked up and down the street again and backed into the diner, closing the door and locking it behind him and turning to the restaurant's kitchen, following the banging noises back behind the counter and through a swinging door.

The kitchen was lit up brightly and Dean stopped in the doorway, staring down at the floor in front of him. Cas was on his knees, pots and pans and commercial-sized cans of ketchup and barbecue sauce strewn around him, ripping into plastic, vacuum-sealed bags of meat, pulled out from the softly humming freezers, digging his fingers inside and sucking the ground beef from them furiously.

"Whoa, Cas … what the hell are you doing?"

Was the meat even edible after all this time, he wondered uncomfortably?

"I don't know," Cas said between mouthfuls, looking up at him with wide, worried eyes. "I just … I just need this."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

"_And then will come Famine, riding on a black steed. He will ride into the land of plenty ... and great will be the Horseman's hunger, for he is hunger. His hunger will seep out and poison the air."_

Boze looked up from the book he was reading and looked at Bobby. "You're kidding, right? A Horseman of the Apocalypse? We even got any lore on how to kill a Horseman?"

Bobby shook his head. "Nope."

"How are we supposed to stop this?"

"I'm not sure that we can," Bobby said, leaning back in his chair with a sigh. "Ellen and Rufus ran into the Horseman, War, in Colorado, before the virus was released. Rufus called in Dean and Sam, and they somehow managed to cut off War's ring. The ring seems to be the key to their power. Without it, War crumpled up and kind of went into a coma."

"Alright, but how do you get close enough to a fucking Horseman to do that?" Boze stared at him, gesturing at the thick, old book in front of him. "I mean, if he's able to influence the air around him, how far does that influence spread?"

"I don't know," Bobby admitted. "The crap we don't know about this stuff would fill the Library of Congress."

"What do we do then?"

"Wait, I guess." Bobby looked down at the book. "Famine is supposed to cross the land, sooner or later, I would think he'll turn up here."

"Oh, that's great," Boze said, shaking his head. "Jesus, that's just fucking great."

Bobby smiled at him wryly. "Go tell the others we need to hit the books. Now."

The tall hunter nodded, getting up and leaving the office.

Picking up the bottle of whiskey on the desk, he poured a generous amount into his glass. Hunger. For food? People were already hungry for food, their intake vastly reduced from the cornucopia of processed and sweetened and packaged food that had been available before.

Maybe not just hunger, though, he thought, looking at the whiskey in his glass. People hungered for many things.

* * *

_**Blackwell, Oklahoma**_

The truck was where they'd left it, almost invisible from the street in the dim, cavernous shadows of the chop-shop. Ty pushed the sliding door all the way, flinching a little at the noise it made as it rumbled along its track.

Jo climbed into the cab and started the engine, watching the side-mirrors as she backed it carefully out and stopped on the wide concrete lot in front of the building. Maurice walked up to the cab and grabbed the arm of the mirror, pulling himself up.

"Straight east to Missouri and Indiana then north?"

She nodded, biting her lower lip. "All back roads, we'll follow you."

"We'll have to stop every night," he said, watching as Ty closed the door again and walked around to the other side of the truck.

"Yeah, but the moon will be rising full in a few nights, and if there's no cloud we can pick up some time then."

"Alright, channel eight?" He looked into the cab at the CB radio sitting below the dash.

Jo reached out and turned it on, flicking through the channels until she reached eight. The line was silent and she looked back at Maurice with a small smile.

"Keep the chatter to a minimum," she warned him.

"Yep. Just let me know when you're ready to call it a day."

He climbed down and walked back to the mustard car parked to one side. They could rotate the driving as they went, but he was comfortable with taking point, and he thought that Jo and Ty got on well enough to manage the long haul in the truck.

Pulling out of the lot, he turned right and began the process of threading their way out of the town and onto the back roads that riddled the country, quiet and unused much of the time, hopefully clear now.

* * *

_**Emporia, Kansas**_

"Cas, not a good idea to eat that," Dean said, crouching beside him.

"I know," the angel said, stuffing another handful into his mouth and chewing furiously. "I can't help it."

"Is this a spell?" Dean asked him, looking around the kitchen uneasily.

"I don't …" Cas started to say then put another handful into his mouth, chewing and swallowing rapidly. "… think so. I'm so hungry, Dean."

"Hungry?" He looked at the mess of meat on the floor for a moment, a memory of a phrase the angel had used teasing his mind. Bobby had said it too, he thought. He closed his eyes, pushing at it hard.

_His hunger will seep out and poison the air._

"Crap, Cas, come on," Dean got to his feet fast, grabbing the angel's arm and pulling him up. "Famine. This is Famine."

Castiel looked down at the bloody remnants of the meat on the floor at his feet, nodding slightly in agreement. "Yes, I think you're right."

"Let's go," the hunter snapped, tugging at Cas' arm and pulling him back out of the kitchen.

"But I haven't finished –" Cas moaned, looking back at the kitchen as he stumbled after Dean through the diner.

"You've finished," Dean said, unlocking the door and shoving Cas out onto the street.

Famine. A Horseman. He could feel his pulse speeding up at the thought. Cas was useless, he thought, the entity's influence was too strong over his vessel, overriding everything. He looked around, suddenly remembering Rufus as he pushed the angel down the street.

On the other side of the road, a winking sign caught his attention and his jaw tightened, remembering the flask in the car, the uneasiness of the older hunter as they'd driven into town. _Goddamn it_.

He got Castiel back to the car and opened the trunk, pushing the protesting angel inside and slamming the lid shut. Running across the street, his senses were on high alert as he tried to watch the darkness between the pools of light from the streetlamps, tried to listen for footfalls or calls or any goddamned thing that would give him some warning of an imminent attack, heading for the neon sign that he was sure had been Rufus' destination.

What had happened to the people here? Had they gone before the Horseman had arrived, he wondered, or had the poison of Famine's hunger driven them all insane?

The bar was as empty as the diner, and Rufus was lying on the floor, an empty bottle next to him.

Hunger took many forms, he thought, kneeling beside the man and pressing the pad of his finger against the artery in his neck. There was a heart beat, slow, but steady, against his finger. He pulled the unconscious hunter up, letting his limp form fold over his shoulder, then straightened, the shotgun held in one hand as his arm curled over Rufus' legs.

_Think, goddammit_, he told himself. He could dump Rufus in the car, and get the hell out of there. That would probably be the easiest way. He didn't want to tackle the damned Horseman on his own with nothing but the knife to take to the fight. Even with it, six or seven demons to get through before he could even reach Famine were bad odds.

On the other hand, he thought grimly, opening the rear door of the Impala and sliding Rufus from his shoulder into the backseat, ignoring the thumps from the trunk, it seemed likely that the Horseman and demons weren't aware of them …yet, anyway.

The idea coalesced slowly as he shut the rear door, and he leaned into the car, pulling the map of the city across the seat toward him, searching for what had to be there.

* * *

_Why wasn't he feeling anything_, he wondered an hour later. Cas was trammelling the inside of the trunk, screaming at him to let him out. Rufus was sweating, hands cuffed together behind him, dark eyes furious, a steady stream of vicious invective flowing from the older hunter as he parked the car in a dark side street.

"Take it easy," Dean said to him as he pulled out the keys and got out.

Both hunter and angel had become more agitated as he'd gotten close to the business district of the town and he'd seen the movement after fifteen minutes of watching, in a small, glass-fronted restaurant between a bank and a modern office building.

The detour hadn't taken much time, once he'd found the pumping station. The county offices had been harder, but the recording equipment had all been there, at least.

_I got a plan. I'm not saying it's a good one. I'm not even saying that it'll work. But it sure as hell beats killing a virgin._

The memory had been of a police station in Colorado. It'd worked there, it would work here. He hoped.

He walked down the street toward the restaurant, wiping his hands on his jeans, not bothering to look around, hearing the stealthy footfalls behind him as he got close to the glass doors.

"Winchester." The voice behind him said.

Bolting toward the doors, shoving them open and stumbling through, he risked a fast glance back as the demons behind him were left standing on the sidewalk, belatedly realising they needed to give chase. He needed to keep two things, and as he came through the foyer into the restaurant room, he let them catch up, stopping as if in shock, staring at the interior of the room.

Four demons stood around a wheelchair in the centre of the room, tables and chairs shoved aside. In front of the chair, three bodies lay, sprawled over each other, their faces slack and unmarked. In the chair, an old, old man sat, bent and twisted up to one side, his pale skin almost translucent against the black suit he wore, fine, whispy hair barely covering the spotted and wrinkled scalp. The Horseman lifted his head and looked at him.

The eyes were filled with life, Dean saw. An avaricious, glittering life that he could feel reaching out for him. After a moment, the old man smiled, lips stretching loosely and revealing a set of poorly-fitting cheap dentures.

"The other Mr Winchester," Famine said, his voice cracked and reedy.

"So this is your big trick? Making people cuckoo for cocoa puffs?" Dean asked, looking at him, one brow raised mockingly, as the demons behind him took the gun from his hand, the other from his jacket pocket.

"Doesn't take much – hardly a push," the Horseman said with a modest smile. "Oh, America – all-you-can-eat, all the time. Consume, consume. A swarm of locusts in stretch pants. And yet, all still starving because hunger doesn't just come from the body, it also comes from the soul."

Dean looked at him carefully. "Funny, it doesn't seem to be coming from mine."

"Yes. I noticed that," Famine said, staring thoughtfully at him. "Have you wondered why that is? How you could even walk in my presence?"

"Well, I like to think it's because of my strength of character," Dean said lightly, gesturing vaguely around the room as he took in the layout and the minutes ticked away in his head.

"I disagree," the Horseman replied, the humour gone from his face completely.

The demon behind him pushed the chair closer to Dean, and Famine looked up at him, head twisted to one side as he reached out and pressed his fingertips against Dean's abdomen.

"Yes. I see. That's one deep, dark nothing you got there, Dean. Can't fill it, can you? Not with food or drink. Not even with sex."

Even through his clothes, the touch of the Horseman was cold, reaching into him, through him, a long worm from the depths of the abyss. He felt his muscles clench under it, his heart falter. _Fuck you_, he thought, trying to drag up sufficient anger to drown out his fear. _Fuck you and the horse you rode in on_.

"You're so full of crap."

Famine lifted his hand, his eyes brightening in the gloom. "Oh, you can smirk and joke and lie to your friends, to those you claim to be protecting, you can lie to yourself, but not to me!"

His eyes widened slightly at he stared at him, and Dean felt the alien touch of those eyes on him, crawling inside of him, fingering his memories, the feel of it filling him with disgust, with shame, with a deep fear that sent an icy shiver up his spine.

"I can see inside you, Dean. I can see how broken you are, how defeated. You can't win, and you know it. But you just keep fighting. Just keep ... going through the motions," the Horseman's voice dropped, rasping in the silence as his face filled with an ill-placed compassion, a pity that tore at Dean more powerfully than the entity's anger had. "You're not hungry, Dean, because inside, you're already ... dead."

The words bit into him like razors and he struggled to push them aside. _Not true, not – true_. His hand was in pocket, the countdown in his mind had almost reached its end and he fought against the Horseman's assertions as he looked up, narrowing his focus to what he had to do, to what was about to happen.

"If that's true, then I have nothing to lose, do I?" he said, looking back down at Famine for a moment before he dropped his weight and twisted away from the demons holding his arms. Taking a long stride to a table that was still on its feet, he pulled the lighter out, the flame leaping into life as he jumped onto the tabletop and lifted his arm.

The restaurant's sprinklers came on with a hiss, and immediately every demon screamed, dropping to their knees as the water burned into them, smoke rising from their blackening skin into the misted air.

"_Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii ... Omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica, ergo, draco maledicte et omnis legio diabolica, adjuramus te, cessa decipere humanas creaturas, eisque æternæ perditionìs venenum propinare vade, satana, inventor et magister omnis fallaciæ, hostis humanæ salutis, humiliare sub potenti manu dei ..."_

The town's emergency broadcast system kicked in on time, Dean's voice blaring from every speaker, from the corners of every major cross street, the volume set to full, the words clear and distinct even inside the restaurant. Turning around, Dean watched the demons convulsing as they dropped to the floor and he looked down at Famine, the Horseman's pale eyes wide as he looked around, his hand fumbling with the motorised control of the wheelchair.

_Cut off the ring to take the power_, he thought, sliding off the wet table and skidding across the slick floor to the being in the chair, his concentration fully locked onto the hand that rested along one narrow arm of the chair, the ring gleaming on the fourth finger. Famine's mouth opened wide as he struggled to get the now-soaked control to move the chair backward and away from the man.

Dean brought the knife down savagely, the tip penetrating the join between bone and joint, going through the tendon and flesh and deep into the plastic beneath. Famine's head snapped around, his mouth opening wide in a shrill scream that rose rapidly from sound to a frequency that was close to angelic. Feeling blood burst from his nose, fill up his eyes and trickle down the side of his neck from his ears, Dean worked the knife blade through the few tags of flesh still holding the finger to the Horseman's hand.

It fell free, landing on the floor and the scream stopped, Famine's head falling limply forward, the eyes open and staring, but the glittering light that had filled them gone. Wiping his eyes and under his nose with his arm, Dean looked down and picked up the severed finger. He slid the heavy ring off and dropped the digit.

He looked around the room, the still-spraying water washing the blood from his face, soaking through his clothes. The demon's vessels were scattered around the room, motionless and graceless in death. The exorcism droned on over the loudspeakers set around the town. Putting the ring in his pocket, he turned wearily, stepping over the bodies and wiping a hand over his face as he walked out of the restaurant and onto the street.

* * *

In the car, Rufus was sitting up and there was finally silence from the trunk. The older hunter looked at Dean as he opened the rear door, turning away. Dean undid the 'cuffs, tossing them onto the seat as Rufus turned back.

"What'd I miss?" Rufus asked sourly.

Dean's mouth lifted at one corner as he shook his head. "Not that much."

He pulled the Horseman's ring from his pocket and handed it to Rufus, straightening up and closing the door. Walking around to the rear, he unlocked the trunk. The angel looked up at him, the stains of the meat and blood still coating his mouth and cheeks and jaw. Taking the offered hand, Cas sat up, climbing out of the trunk and looking up at the speaker on the nearest cross street, his eyes narrowing slightly as he took in the exorcism looping on and on.

"You killed the Horseman?"

Dean nodded, shutting the trunk and gesturing to the car door. "Not sure if he's dead, but I got the ring."

Rufus got out, handing the ring back to Dean as the angel got into the car behind him. The hunters walked around the car, opening the front doors and getting in.

"Bet there's a story to go with this," Rufus said softly as he closed the passenger door and looked over at Dean.

Dean shook his head. "No."

He started the car and pulled out from the kerb, feeling Rufus' speculative gaze on him, ignoring it as he watched the road ahead.

_Inside … you're already … dead_.

The words played through his mind and he tried to push them aside, tried to shove them back behind the walls of his mind where every bad memory was stockpiled, locked away when he was conscious. The crowding behind those walls was getting bad.

_Dead_.

He wasn't, he told himself forcefully. He wasn't.


	8. Chapter 8 Martyrs and Missteps

**Chapter 8 Martyrs and Missteps**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The black car chugged slowly down the drive, the gate closing behind them. People turned to watch their progress, lifting their hands and smiling as the car passed, gestures Dean found almost incomprehensible.

"You alright, Dean?" Rufus asked as they pulled up in front of the big workshop.

"Yeah," Dean said, turning off the engine and nodding. "I'm fine."

Rufus looked at him sceptically for a moment then got out. The air smelled clean and fresh, the breeze off the lake cool and moist. Decent food, he thought, walking down to the house, hot shower. Eight hours uninterrupted. He snorted to himself. It was highly unlikely he'd manage more than one out of three before nightfall.

Dean got out and looked around. Four cabins were mostly complete, he thought, looking across the gravel drive at the work sites, surrounded by people. On the other side of the house, he could hear the shriek of childrens' voices, somewhere near the deeply dug beds of the proposed vegetable garden. After watching the expressions of those who'd been enslaved in Kansas, he couldn't get over how different the people here looked … purposeful, smiling, concentrating … happy.

Cas followed him up the steps to the house, and they both turned down the hall to Bobby's office.

Bobby looked up as Dean pushed the door open, rubbing his eyes tiredly and pushing the book he was reading to one side. Dean walked to the desk, while the angel crossed the room to stand by the window, looking out.

Bobby blinked as Dean dropped the ring of Famine on the desk in front of him.

"Famine?"

"Ran into him on the way out of Kansas," Dean confirmed, dropping into the chair next to the desk.

"That'll take a load off Boze's mind," Bobby said with a wry grin. "He's been worried all week about how to deal with a Horseman if he showed up here."

"Still got two more," Dean reminded him. "Everything alright here?"

"Yeah, good weather, plenty of work, no problems."

"Supplies?"

"Sent out a single team with three of the five ton trucks last week," Bobby told him. "Store rooms are full, enough damned furniture and household goods to sink a ship. Ellen's organising another run like that at the end of the month."

Dean nodded slowly. The smaller teams hadn't been as efficient, couldn't carry as much, took up too much manpower.

"Ellen's idea?"

Bobby nodded. "Eight went out, four hunters, four civilians. Worked well."

"Wichita is going to be demanding," Dean said, looking at him.

"Didn't expect otherwise."

"No."

"Getting them out is one thing, Dean," Bobby said, pushing his cap back as he scratched his head. "Where are we going to put 'em when they get here?"

"It's a good question," Dean admitted. "The town, I guess. I don't know how we're going to defend it."

"Or how to feed that many people." Castiel turned to look at them. "This place is good for now, but you will need more and soon. Places that can be farmed to produce enough food. That can be defended."

Bobby and Dean looked back at him. The angel was right, Dean thought tiredly. Scavenging from the corpse of the old world was fine when they barely numbered a hundred. But a thousand … or two. That changed the situation completely.

"Nowhere's going to be safe to do that until Lucifer's put down," Bobby said slowly. "Mebbe not even then."

Dean turned his head to look at him. "Crap new world, right?"

* * *

Ellen looked at Alex expectantly. "What do you think?"

Alex stared down at the map. "More camps, like this one."

"What do you mean?" Chuck leaned across the table, looking down at the map she'd marked up.

"Look, between the demons and the croaties and the regular monsters, no town or normal farmstead can be defended. It takes too much work, too many skilled people to cover a big area." She pointed to the map. "This farmland is good. If you look at the medieval model, you build a fort or a fortified village, here, in the middle. Everyone goes behind the walls at night and it's patrolled. Through the day, people can work the fields or the livestock around the defences. There's an alarm of some sort, and you can keep your lookouts to a minimum, use radio to communicate …"

She looked up at Ellen. "It's the way it worked for a thousand years, before cities started to develop."

"How do we get access to the farm produce, assuming that the bulk of the hunters are staying here?" Ellen asked, frowning at the map.

"We trade for what we need. Fish and game maybe, for grains and vegetables and fruit. Or skills for food. But this is the only way I can think of to make it work with a much larger group of people."

Chuck nodded. "The feudal system had its problems, but in this situation, I think she's right."

"Are we setting up folks to become lords and kings then?"

"No." Alex shook her head. "You have a few hunters, experienced ones, at each fort. Their only job is to protect against whatever comes. You train up enough people for each settlement to be able to defend themselves. Ring it in iron, if possible. Put those mines from Battle Creek around each one, in place of a moat or some other defence line that can't be crossed." She frowned as she tried to recall the details of the system from the little she'd retained of her college historical studies. "Each settlement could be responsible for sending out its own group scavenging for whatever they didn't have or couldn't make, or it could be a part of a trade agreement that we provide the hard-to-find stuff, in return for enough food for the year."

"And what if no one wants to be a farmer?"

Alex looked up at her with a dry smile. "Then no one eats."

* * *

Renee looked up as Lisa came into the greenhouse, one brow raised at the expression on her face.

"What's up?" She wiped her hands on the thick apron she wore habitually, brushing the soft, crumbly compost from them.

"Just wondered if you had a few minutes?" Lisa said, looking at the rows of seedlings that were growing on the shelving to both sides and up the middle of the greenhouse.

"Sure." Renee took off the apron and hung it behind the door. "I could use a break."

They walked up the side of the house to the kitchen, going in through the back room and nodding to Chuck and Alex as they passed through. In the kitchen, Renee poured them both coffees and gestured to the table, sitting down opposite the other woman.

"This about Dean?" Renee asked, blowing over the surface of her coffee. Lisa looked at her and nodded.

"I'm kidding myself, right?" she said, looking down at her cup. "It won't change."

Shrugging, Renee leaned back in her chair, lifting a hand to push back the short, blonde curls that she'd gotten used to now.

"Depends on what you mean," she said. "Even from the beginning, he never looked like he had any time to spare, Lise, and he didn't strike me as being a man very much interested in making a deeper connection with anyone." She looked at Lisa's downturned face. "You said that he told you that what you've got now was all there is, take it or leave it. Why did you think that would change?"

Lisa looked up with a self-deprecating smile. "I told him I loved him."

"And?"

"And nothing. He's been back for four days, and he hasn't mentioned it, comes in late, doesn't want to … you know, fool around …"

"I'm thinking that trying to organise the attack on a city full of demons and rescue more than a thousand slaves, get them back here, safe and in one piece, and find somewhere to put them … might be taking up his attention right now," Renee said dryly.

"Yeah, of course," Lisa agreed. "But I don't think it's just that."

"You think he doesn't want to talk about it, or think about it."

"Yeah." She looked out through the window, the afternoon sun lighting up the trees and lake beyond the house in shades of fiery gold.

"And if he doesn't?"

Lisa turned back to her. "What do I do?"

"Nothing," Renee said, gesturing vaguely. "Look, you've got three options … you say nothing, and go on as you are, understanding, accepting, that it probably won't change at all. Two, you tell him you want more, he tells you he doesn't, you break up. Or three, you figure out which is more important to you, what you have now, or being with someone who will give you what it is you want."

"You sound like Dear Abbey," Lisa commented sourly.

Renee laughed. "The problems of love are pretty damned universal, Lise. Country to country, century to century, they don't change. People don't change. But you have those choices. I realise that none of them get you what you want. But one of them will be what you can either live with, or that you need, and I hate to say it, but it's going to be up to you to figure out which is which."

"You don't think he'll ever want more, do you?"

"No, sweetie, I don't." Renee finished her coffee and looked down into the cup. "I used to think that loving someone with everything you've got could make a difference. I learned otherwise. And in the process, I learned that love isn't really love unless it's reciprocated by the other person. No matter how desperately you feel, love only grows when both feel it, want it. If they don't, then it's just a crush, really, and it fades after awhile."

Lisa was silent for a moment. "Renee, I met Dean at nineteen. We had one weekend, and then he disappeared, no call, no letters, no nothing. And then he turned up again, out of the blue, eight years later. He saved my son. And then he disappeared again. It was just under three years when he came just after the virus hit my town. In all that time, the way I felt never disappeared, never changed. Every time I saw him again, it felt exactly the same."

Renee nodded. "But now it is, isn't it?"

"How did –"

"Because those flash-in-the-pan visits … they gave you a chance to build up a person in your mind who wasn't him. One weekend? You don't get to know a person in a weekend, not even a simple person and no one can accuse Dean of being simple," she said, grimacing slightly. "The next time he actually saved Ben? If that doesn't invite a good solid set of fantasies, I don't know what would. And then he saved you both."

"But –"

"Right. But. Now you've been living with him for ten months. You've seen him in a lot of situations that people don't usually get to see each other in," Renee said gently. "Look, I don't mean to make light of your feelings, Lise, but realistically, whatever you had in your head, all those years, it wasn't real. Wasn't him. And you haven't been paying attention to the real man who's right in front of you. You keep trying to make him fit into the fantasy."

Lisa frowned. "I don't think I'm doing that."

Renee smiled. "I'm damned sure that's what you're doing. And it's normal, I mean, it's natural to want that. But it's not going to work. It won't ever work."

"So I should just give up?" Lisa looked over at her. "Let him find someone else?"

"I'm saying that you should do whatever you need to do to find your own happiness, not something that's dependent on another person."

"I know what I want, what I need to be happy, Renee," Lisa said stubbornly.

Renee tilted her head a little, looking at her thoughtfully. "I don't think you do, Lise."

Leaning against the wall on the other side of the kitchen doorway, Ben turned away, walking slowly down the hall.

* * *

"A feudal system," Bobby said consideringly, leaning back in the chair.

The office was full again, Dean, Rufus, Ellen, Boze and Tim, Vincent, Michael and Rona, Chuck and Cas, Emmett and Max and Maggie perching on the chairs and sofas, standing around the walls, the maps of Kansas and Michigan side by side and covering the desk.

"You talking castles and knights, Bobby?" Tim peered around Rufus to see the maps.

"No, idjit," Bobby scowled at him impatiently. "It'll work, you know. Keeps people in small enough groups that we don't need so many to protect 'em, to govern them either."

"How many of these settlements would we need?" Dean looked down at the map. "And where?"

Ellen inched her way past Emmett, pulling out the large-scale map of the local area from underneath the state wide map.

"There are five places that are close by and can be made easily defensible," she said, tapping the red areas that Alex had marked on it. "They're close to water, have arable land surrounding them, have enough of a rise to build a decent sized holding in the middle."

"Who marked this up?" Dean looked up at her.

"Chuck and Alex worked out the areas that had all the features that were needed," Bobby said, glancing across the room at Chuck. Dean looked at him and he nodded.

"Uh, apparently Alex did medieval studies at college," Chuck said diffidently. "We went through some of the books that were still in the Tawas Library and checked out what we thought was needed, but it was Alex's idea," he added, glancing at Ellen.

Dean looked back at the map. The five areas overlapped each other slightly, two of them, including Chitaqua, on the eastern side of Lake Tawas, the other three on the western side.

"The western settlements would be primarily agriculture," Ellen said, leaning on the desk. "The eastern settlements primarily fishing and hunting and scavenging. We trade between to get what we need."

"Each settlement needs to be big enough to accommodate about three to five hundred people," Bobby added. "That's enough to work the farms, go hunting, fishing, whatever and still have a decent amount of people for protection and those who aren't necessarily up to the physical labour but have other useful skills." He looked dourly at his wheelchair.

"At the moment," Ellen said. "We've got enough ready-made goods to make it without a hassle, but if we're looking to the future, we need to start getting people ready to make their weapons, make their clothing, making whatever it is they need."

Dean frowned. "That's a long way off, isn't it?"

"Yeah, but if those skills all die out, a few generations down the line you're looking at being back in half-cured skins with wooden clubs."

He tipped back his head and closed his eyes, unable to worry about what might happen to anyone a few generations down the line. If he didn't defeat Lucifer – there wouldn't be any generations down the line. "Alright. How long to build these … settlements?"

"If we can get a couple up quickly – and very basically," Bobby said, looking around at the men and women in the room. "Then we could get the people from Wichita and they could do the rest."

"Quickly," Dean repeated doubtfully, looking at Liev. "One month, two?"

Liev nodded. "Yes, with everyone working on them that would be achievable. Foundations, stockade wall, a few simple buildings."

"Which one first?"

"Two miles from the western edge of Lake Tawas," Liev said, looking at Bobby. "The location is good, we can take logs from the forest across the lake, save on time, and there are several well-cared for farms on that side. The ground rises from the lake as well, make the place easier to defend."

"How many do you need?" Dean asked.

"Everyone," Liev said.

Dean's mouth lifted at one corner. "Everyone?"

"We'll need the two flat bed rigs to take some equipment over," Rufus said thoughtfully, looking at the map. "Cut the foundations, and set in the perimeter fence."

Liev nodded. "The more people, the faster it will go."

"What about the cabins here?"

"We've got four up and the other two are framed," Liev said. "It'll be a couple more weeks to lock up for those."

"Alright," Dean said, rubbing a hand over his jaw as he looked at the map. "Boze, Tim, Vincent and Michael, you get the flatbeds and get some earthmovers over to the location. Take Chuck and Matt and Liev," he added, glancing at the carpenter who nodded. "And get it marked out, pegged. Two of you do nothing but watch. You're on guard. The others can level out the ground and get started on the foundations. As soon as Maurice and Ty get back, they can take Terry and whoever can handle a chainsaw and start cutting whatever they need." He looked across at Rufus. "Ideas on how to get those logs across the lake?"

"They'll float, we need a couple of motorboats to act as tugs, and we're good," Rufus said with a shrug. "Plenty of those on the lake."

"Start stockpiling on the other side then," Dean agreed. "Emmett, you and Max and Maggie need to take a dozen of the civilians on another supply run. Right around the state again but not too close to Detroit. Take two of the five-ton trucks and grab everything that's needed for the new people – Ellen can give you a list of start up gear."

He looked at Ellen and Bobby. "Everyone else stays here and gets our stuff organised – food, the cabins, fishing and trapping if there's anyone who can do it. Rona, Risa and Mel go with anyone who leaves camp. Franklin and me'll keep an eye on what's going on inside the camp."

The men and women nodded, thinking of what the new duties would require. Franklin looked at Dean.

"I take it that means that our classes are over?" he asked.

Dean shook his head. "No, we'll try and fit 'em in the evenings, whenever we can. We still have to get those people out of Wichita, and all the way back here," he said, getting up. "Which reminds me, how many do we have who can drive a bus?"

* * *

Dean leaned against the porch rail at the southern side of the house, looking down at the people working in the extensive truck garden that had been built on the sheltered slope there. There were ten women, hoeing and weeding and raking the soft dark earth, and more than a dozen children using smaller tools, or planting, or watering or picking the fresh new leaves. He turned his head as Ellen walked up beside him.

"You got names for the faces yet?" he asked her, looking back at the garden.

"A few," Ellen said, leaning on her elbows beside him. "Two came in with us, Michelle and Debbie, I think you know them?"

He nodded, picking them out amongst the others. "And the rest?"

"Emmett's survivors," she said more quietly. "The tall black woman at the end, that's Dominique, she was in a slave group, Max said. Next to her is Mary, from the same group. Terry, Jake and Simon were also in that group."

Dean watched the two women working side by side. "They keeping together for any reason?"

"Dominique ran a bar in Cincinnati," Ellen said. "Pretty classy place, from what she said. Mary came from Alabama. I don't know all the details but her father was murdered in the early sixties down there, some kind of hate killing, I think. She wasn't treated well and she clings to Dom. I don't think Dom minds all that much."

"The others …" she said, turning to head. "That's Therese, in the pink shirt. She has two kids, managed to keep them with her and safe until Emmett and Max found her. Carolyn's the redhead, widow of an Irish cop apparently. Monica and Danielle were at college when the virus went through it. They hid in the library for eight weeks, living off the vending machines, they said. Haley and Jocelyn met up with them just before Maggie found them."

"Any problems with anyone since the thaw?"

"No," Ellen said. "No, what happened was a pretty good lesson for everyone to treat each other with respect. People get depressed, from time to time, I think, but they usually just stay in their rooms, or cabins. A day or so, and I see them again. It's better when there's work to do."

He nodded. "Yeah, takes your mind off crap."

"We've got fourteen people who've driven buses, Dean," Ellen said, looking at him. "It's not enough."

He closed his eyes. "No, not by a long way. Even if we overload them." Straightening up, he turned away from the rail. "We'll figure it out."

"I don't like to think of those people there."

"We'll get 'em killed if we go in without being ready," he said. "I don't like it any better than you do, but right now, there's nothing else I can do."

"I know." She looked down at the rail under her hands. "How did Jo handle herself?"

"She was good," he said lightly. "They took out the demons and got the ordnance and they should be here by the end of the week." He looked at her. "Took your time asking."

"I'm not gonna apologise for wanting her safe."

He shook his head. "None of us are safe, Ellen."

* * *

_**Seymour, Indiana**_

"What is that?" Ty said, staring at the slow-moving group of lights two miles to their right.

"Vehicles," Jo said, lifting the glasses up as the truck rumbled along the road. "Four of them. Heading south."

The radio under the dash crackled and Jo reached for the mike.

"Jo, you get a look at those lights?" Maurice's voice came quietly from the speaker.

"Yeah, four going south."

"We should have a look."

Jo reached for the map beside her, shielding the penlight with her hand as she looked at the roads that would let them intercept the group. "We can take mile marker twenty, cut over. There's a bend that might give us a view."

"Sounds good, out," Maurice said. The moonlight was bright enough to see the mustard car ahead of them, despite the fact that Maurice was driving with no lights at all. The taillights had been thoroughly blacked out before they'd left Blackwell. Ty followed him to the marker and they turned right, snaking down a narrow road toward the oncoming group, their headlights easily visible against the darkness.

"We should get there before they come," Jo said, chewing on her lip.

"How do we decide if they're friendly or not?" Ty glanced across at her. She rubbed her forehead, thinking.

"Croaties and monsters don't drive," she said slowly. "Devil's trap on the road is going to stop demons, but not friendlies."

"Will we have enough time?"

"If you step on it," she said, reaching into her duffle for the cans of paint they all carried now.

* * *

Sitting in the truck, back down a dark, overgrown gravel road with a view of the two lane blacktop in front of them, Jo wondered exactly how it would work. Would it stop the car? Or would the demon driving be forced to brake?

"Here they come," Maurice's voice crackled softly from the speaker.

Time to find out, she thought, lifting the glasses and focussing them on the twenty five feet of road that Maurice had drawn the trap across. The first car went through, slowing as soon as it had crossed the second line of the circle, the rear window disappearing in an explosion of glass as the demons inside the vehicle were held in the trap while the car kept going. Driverless, it trundled down into the ditch on the other side of the road and stalled. The two demons in the trap were run over by the second and third cars as they behaved in exactly the same way, slowing and continuing on without their drivers who were left behind in the trap. There'd been four in those two cars, and she watched them freeze, throwing up their arms as the fourth car managed to stop on the outer edge of the trap, it's headlights illuminating the stretch of road and the trap.

"Out! Now!" Jo snapped, opening her door and jumping down, racking the slide on the pump action she carried one-handed as the gallon jug of holy water in her other hand dragged at her with its weight.

Ty was running beside her, and he fired a double-barrelled blast at the three demons who emerged from the fourth car, the salt-loaded shells hitting two of them high in the chest and knocking them backwards. On the road behind the car, Maurice came out with a fireman's knapsack strapped to his back, pumping holy water onto the third demon, swinging the flexible hose around to spray the other two as they stumbled backwards toward him.

Ty turned as the door of one of the cars in the ditch opened, and a man fell out. Jo flashed a look behind her and nodded to him, and he ran across the road.

Maurice drove the three demons into the trap and Jo threw her gallon jug over them, pulling the small bible from her jacket pocket and feeling the marked pages with her fingertips. In the light from the headlights of the car, she read the exorcism, her voice gaining strength as the Latin ritual flowed smoothly, and the demons inside the circle began to convulse.

* * *

Jo looked at the man steadily, noting his lack of discomfort at the position he was in with a certain amount of suspicion.

"No brands, no chains," she said quietly, flicking a sideways glance at Maurice.

The farmhouse had been four miles north and six miles west of the road the demons had been using to transport the man, empty, gleaned of every trace of food but with its furnishings left intact. Maurice's Mercury and the M939 were parked out of sight of the road and they'd blacked out all the windows, spray-painting most of them, using the blankets and table linen for the rest.

Maurice nodded. "How 'bout you run your story by us again, Mr Ackers?"

Ackers looked at them tiredly. "Are these really necessary?"

He lifted his hands, the handcuffs clinking together. "It's not like I can run anywhere."

"Well, we'll see," Maurice said. "Your story, Mr Ackers?"

"My name is Jerome Ackers. I'm fifty-eight years old, a history professor at Columbia. I survived the virus purely because I couldn't get out of my apartment once the power went out," he said, looking down at his legs. They were wasted and twisted, the cloth of his trousers hanging loosely from them. "I had polio as a child, and I've been in a wheelchair ever since." He looked at Jo. "I have no idea why I would be important to demons. They found me and grabbed me and were talking about driving to Atlanta, but they didn't say why."

"Atlanta," Ty repeated.

"Yes, Atlanta," Ackers said shortly. "Who are you people?"

"You see, Mr Ackers," Maurice said slowly. "Demons don't usually bother providing an escort of nine for a single, unimportant human."

"I can't tell you their motivations," Ackers said exasperatedly. "I didn't even know they weren't human until you told me!"

"What was your specialty? In Columbia?" Jo asked.

"Ancient history," Ackers said. "Pre-Christian societies, Aramaic, Akkadian."

She got up, gesturing to Maurice. Ty watched Ackers as Jo and Maurice left the room and walked down the hall to the kitchen.

"What do you think?" she asked him.

"Got me," Maurice said, shaking his head slightly. "No way an ordinary history prof gets an escort like that. And going to Atlanta, he's obviously of importance somehow to Lucifer."

"Yeah," she said, looking down at the floor. "So, we have to take him back with us."

"Looks like."

"You still got your hex bags?"

"Yeah, front and rear," Maurice said. "I don't think we'll be spotted."

"Straight north then?"

He nodded. "Yeah, hammer down. Let's get this load home."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

"Dean?"

Dean looked around and saw Ben, standing awkwardly behind him, half-silhouetted against the workshop's open doorway. "Yeah?"

"Can I talk to you?"

"Sure," he set down the length of timber he'd been smoothing off and pulled off his gloves. "What is it?"

The boy had turned eleven in February and had shot up a couple of inches, but his face still held the soft roundness of childhood and Dean watched, bemused, as a line of red rose up his neck.

"Can't be that bad, buddy," he said gently. "Spit it out."

"It's about … you … and Mom," Ben got out uncomfortably. Suddenly feeling the same discomfort, Dean looked away, shuffling a few steps to lean against the bench behind him.

"What about us, Ben?" he asked.

"Why don't you love her?" The question burst out as Ben stared at the man in front of him, hands balled into fists involuntarily. "I mean, you … you're …" he faltered into silence, not sure exactly how to word what he was thinking without it sounding like Duncan when he'd had a beer or two.

Dean looked down at him, as unwilling as Ben to finish the sentence. Sleeping with her. Having sex with her. The rest of the possible responses were just as blunt and not as polite.

"Yeah," he hedged. "But that, uh … that doesn't mean we're … uh … committed to anything else, Ben."

"She loves you," Ben said, looking at the floor, his face reddening. "You could get married, we could be a family."

Growing up, Dean'd heard a lot from other kids at the schools they'd blown in and out of about step-parents and divorces and mothers and fathers re-marrying. He'd never once asked his father why he'd never met anyone else, why he hadn't remarried. Looking down at the boy now, he realised why. John Winchester had never once shown any interest in a woman that had lasted longer than a few hours. He wondered distractedly if he'd absorbed that ability to take what he needed without forming any lasting emotional ties, through those years.

He dragged in a deep breath. "Ben, I care about your mom, and you, a lot, okay?" he said slowly. "But that's not enough. I just can't – I have responsibilities here, to the people here, to keeping them safe and there's –"

"Why can't you do both?" Ben interrupted him. "Tim does his work but –"

"Because I can't," Dean said, a little more harshly than he'd intended. He watched Ben's eyes fill up and looked away.

"You don't want to, you mean," Ben said quietly, his expression older, with an adult's insight.

Dean nodded slowly, wondering if that was the easier explanation. "Yeah, maybe."

Ben turned and walked out of the workshop, and Dean watched him go. _If you don't want to, then you shouldn't be with her_, he thought to himself. It wasn't fair on her or on Ben to have fostered those hopes when there was no chance of them happening.

He turned back to the bench and picked up the length of timber, running his hand down the smooth surface. _I'll move out tonight_, he thought vaguely. _Tell her, and crash somewhere else_. The fact that it didn't stir even a moment's regret in him told him more than anything else could've about the situation.

* * *

_Stay or go._

The thought had looped through her mind for three weeks now, and she was no closer to coming to a decision. The return of the hunters from Kansas, the plans being put into place to build new settlements, the need for everyone to do their part had pulled at her to stay. But it didn't change how it felt.

Alex walked along the path to the church slowly, her head bent as she struggled with her thoughts. She knew she'd helped here, had made some differences to the people who lived here, even if they were small ones. The nightmares, the tension that seemed to come from nowhere and settle into her bones, her increasing jumpiness at small sounds, half-glimpsed movements in her peripheral vision, those had all gotten worse. It wasn't rational and it was damned hard to fight against. And aside from the obvious reason, she couldn't work out why.

Climbing the short flight of steps to the church doors, she pushed them open, walking inside and closing them behind her, feeling the stillness and peace of the space seeping into her. She'd always loved the deep silence of old churches, the weight of the time they'd been in service, filled with the prayers and hopes and anguish of the people who'd come and let their emotions sink into the stone and timber, to light a candle and leave, feeling lighter or not, but having shared their joy or grief with something outside of themselves.

Taking a seat on the narrow pew near the simple altar, she crossed her arms against the back of the pew in front of her and closed her eyes, trying to let go of the tangled mess of thoughts in her head, release them to the silence and be rid of them, for a while at least.

She was barely aware of the whisper of Father Michael's feet as he walked down the side aisle in response to the knock at the door, barely aware of anything except the need to be quiet, to be empty and still and alone.

Father Michael opened the door and slipped through it, forcing Dean to take a step back down the stairs as the priest closed the door behind him.

"Padre," Dean said.

"Did you want to see me, Dean?"

"Uh, no," he said, glancing past the priest at the door. "I saw Alex go in."

"She's been here every day," Father Michael said quietly, looking carefully at the man in front of him. "Looking for peace, I think."

"Hmmm."

"It wouldn't be helpful to her to lose this place, Dean," the priest said. "She needs one place where she can feel safe."

Dean looked down uncomfortably. "I wasn't going –"

"No, I know," Father Michael cut him off. "Ellen doesn't mean to push either, you know, but she is."

"What do you mean?"

"For some people, the past is more powerful than anything their present holds," Father Michael said, gesturing to the simple cut-log bench seat at the foot of the steps. "Things that weren't resolved, weren't dealt with, perhaps, or fears that have never been faced."

Dean backed off the steps, feeling an uneasy twist in his stomach as he listened to the man. He followed him reluctantly to the bench, sitting down as the priest did.

"It doesn't matter how much a person tries to rationalise it, the feelings, the emotions are simply much stronger than the thoughts."

"Do you have a point you're getting around to, padre?" Dean asked, brows drawing together a little.

"I do," Father Michael said. "If you or Ellen or Bobby keep pushing Alex, trying to force her back, she will run again, as she did before."

"What?"

"Just leave her alone, Dean," he said. "I don't think she wants to leave, she seems to be trying to find reasons to stay."

"Leaving would be suicide, Father," Dean said tersely, looking past him to the doors of the church. "You know that."

"For her, staying would be worse," Father Michael said, shrugging. "She's a private person, and the last few weeks have been too exposed for her." He looked at Dean thoughtfully, his head inclined a little. "I think you know what I mean."

Dean looked away from the man's gaze, uncertain of what the man had seen in him, not wanting him to see any more than he already had.

"I wanted to make sure she was okay," he said, looking down. It was the truth, he realised. He'd been worried about her. He still was.

Father Michael nodded understandingly. "She isn't. Not yet. But tell the others to leave her be, and I think she will be."

* * *

_**Atlanta, Georgia**_

"He got away?" Lucifer turned on his heel and strode across the long marble floor, lifting his hand and tightening it into a fist. The demon who'd delivered the unpalatable news disintegrated, vaporised and burned at the same time, leaving a small pile of ash on the smooth black-veined surface.

"How is it possible for a man who cannot walk, who has required a wheelchair for the last forty-eight years to simply 'get away'?" The cold hazel eyes stared at the other demon. "Did he presto-chango, up and vanish? Did he fly? Or did someone aid him?"

The demon swallowed, unable to keep his gaze from dropping nervously to the pile beside him. "We found the cars by the side of the road, my Lord, burned up. The meatsuits were destroyed but there was no indication that the escort had escaped."

"Interesting," the Fallen archangel turned around and looked through the long row of floor-to-ceiling windows that lined one side of the room, across a long stretch of emerald green grass to the woods beyond the gardens. "You found no traps, no traces of salt or holy water, nothing to indicate that someone might've laid ambush to the escort, might've taken them by force?"

"N-n-no, my Lord."

"I suggest that you return then, and look again." The command was given with a snap, Lucifer's gaze remaining on the view.

The demon nodded and backed out of the room, colliding with one of the double doors and flinching at the noise as he hurriedly spun around and almost ran along the broad hallway beyond.

"What do you think, Sam?" Lucifer said musingly. "Do you think your brother knew what Ackers was?"

The room remained silent and the dark angel smiled. "It's amazing that I haven't been able to find him in all this time. He must have learned some new tricks, not to have gone anywhere you knew about as well."

He turned from the windows and walked down the length of the room. "No matter, Sammy, we'll find him in the end. Or he'll come to us; it's only a matter of time. And I believe that those fools are going to open the fifth Seal any time now. Do you want to see what I've got ready for that? I may not be able to see Dean, but I'm certain one of them will."

He walked through the door at the far end of the room and into another room, almost as large but circular. In the centre of the floor, an enormous circle had been drawn in blood, seven smaller circles inside its boundaries, overlapping and the junctions of them marked with piles of entrails and candles made of fat, flickering unsteadily in the semi-darkness. In the centre of them, a man stood. He was tall and very thin, almost skeletal, the speckled flesh drawn tightly over the bones. Black hair, receding from a high forehead, was slicked back, curling at the collar of the old-fashioned black cadaver's suit, its slit up the back stitched loosely together. He opened his eyes and stared at Lucifer. The eyes were ancient. And they were patient.

"This is old," Lucifer said conversationally. "Very old. As old as the Seal it controls. The martyrs gave up their lives for God's Word. They were stoned and hung, quartered and beaten and pulled apart because they would not recant, would not worship another even to save themselves." The angel sighed. "Strong-willed lot."

"They were supposed to rise and be welcomed into Heaven," Lucifer continued, his eyes cutting away from the entity at the centre of the circles uneasily. "Not going to happen. Not yet, anyway. There's a little job they can do for me first."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Jo sighed as the truck rumbled over the gate track and headed down the drive, following the Mercury slowly. She couldn't wait to have a hot shower, and something not compressed and dehydrated to eat.

"Good to be home, huh?" Ty grinned at her as he heard the sigh. She smiled back at him.

"Yeah, although I guess we'll have to spend another couple of hours unloading the truck and going through whatever debriefing Bobby and Dean are going to want."

"I guess."

He pulled up outside the house and they got out of the cab slowly, dropping to the ground as Ellen, Dean and Rufus came down the steps to meet them.

"Took your time," Rufus remarked sourly.

"Picked up something extra," Jo said, gesturing to the Mercury as Maurice got out. "Something interesting."

Maurice opened the back door of the Mercury and leaned inside, the muscles of his shoulders and back flexing as he took the weight of the man sitting in the back seat and lifted him out.

"Where do you want him?"

Dean flicked a glance at Bobby. The older hunter lifted a brow slightly in response.

* * *

Jerome Ackers sat in the wooden carver beside Bobby's desk, his hands curled on the arms as he looked around at the faces of the people in the office. Dean watched the man's gaze slip from one hunter to another. Ackers eyes sharpened on Maggie for a second then moved on, and he frowned, not sure if he'd seen that slight hesitation or not as the dark eyes moved back to focus on him then slid to Bobby.

"I could say it in Swahili – would that make it any plainer?" he said acidly. "I don't know what they wanted with me."

"Well, Mr Ackers," Bobby said slowly. "We'd like to believe you, we would, save us the time of having to sit here and look at ya. But the fact remains that you were being taken to Atlanta to meet the devil, and we haven't found anyone else who's that important to Lucifer."

"Lucifer?" Ackers sputtered disbelievingly. "The devil? Am I supposed to join in your mass delusion that Satan is walking the earth?"

"Not a delusion," Ellen said tightly. "It would be so much easier if it was."

"Madam, I have studied the history and anthropology of mankind since before Alexander, and let me assure that the mythology of a fallen angel is just that, legend. Every culture had the same psychological fixation on blaming their sins on someone else." Ackers shifted in the chair, looking from Ellen back to Bobby. "Really, what we have here –"

Dean's brows drew together slightly. "What we have here is a world that's going to be fucked six ways from Sunday unless we can put Lucifer down," he cut in. "And we don't have that many answers on how to do it. So take a moment, prof, think it through. What could you possibly know that would be of interest to a mythological fallen angel?"

Ackers looked at him, lips pursed tightly. "Young man, I do not have the answers you are attempting to find."

Dean shrugged, getting to his feet. "Leave him in here, Bobby?"

Bobby nodded, looking at Ty and waving a hand. The young man picked up the handcuffs and slipped them around Ackers' hands, chaining him to the chair.

"This is an outrage!" Ackers said furiously, looking from Ty to Bobby. "I can't help you!"

"Then you can sit there and be quiet for a spell," Bobby said sourly. Ty stepped the behind the chair, twisting a long piece of silk in his hands and slipping it over his face, the material settling across Ackers mouth. He tied it at the back of his head, gagging the man.

"What now?" Rufus looked from Bobby to Dean.

"Get the truck unloaded," Dean said, looking around at them. "Franklin's cleared out the back of the workshop."

* * *

"_Daddy!"_

"_Mary, get back inside," her father screamed as he was dragged away. "Get back inside the house!"_

_She couldn't move, not even to follow her father's orders. He struggled in the grip of the men and she could hear the fear in his voice, hear the panic as the rough hemp noose dropped around his neck._

"_You ain't a preacher, boy," one of the men growled. "Just an animal and no animals can talk to God on folks behalf."_

"_Give it up, Isaiah," another one shouted, throwing the coil over the branch and pulling until all the slack was gone. "All ya gotta do is tell us you don't believe in God, don't know nuthin' about Him, and we'll let ya go!"_

_Mary heard their laughter, the sound making her hunch tighter against the porch steps. _

"_No! NO!"_

"_Too bad," the first man said, and nodded to the man behind him. The rope stretched and tightened, and Isaiah choked as his heels dragged on the ground, then lifted free._

Mary sat up in her bed, her hands pressed against her eyes, her chest heaving as she pulled herself free of the dream.

"Dom?"

The room was dark and silent, and she reached out blindly for the lamp beside her. Dominique's bed was smooth and empty.

"Mary?"

She jammed her fist in her mouth at the sound of the voice, staring at the window beyond the other woman's bed.

"Mary, it's Daddy, let me in, child."

Mary got out of her bed, bare feet padding across the floor to the window. "Daddy, no, it can't be you."

"It is, honey. The Day of Judgement has come. Let me in, baby, I want to see you."

She looked down at the darkness outside. She could see him, standing with others, near the line of trees behind the last cabin.

"Daddy … are you real?"

"As real as you, sweetheart," Isaiah looked up at the window. "Let me in."

* * *

Bobby wheeled himself to the hearth in the living room, Dean, Ellen and Rufus following him.

"Well, what do you want to do with him?" Bobby looked at them.

"Do you believe him?" Dean asked.

"No," Bobby said, shaking his head. "He was too in control, had too many answers ready for us."

Ellen shrugged. "Fresh out of ideas here, Bobby. It's not like we can just torture him."

Dean felt himself flinch inside, looking at the flames leaping from the logs behind him, steeling himself to keep his face blank.

"No." Rufus sat down in the chair beside the fire. "Maybe we can work some kind of good cop/bad cop thing, but it'll take time."

"I need a drink," Ellen said, walking to the long sideboard on the other side of the hearth. "Takers?"

"Yeah," Bobby said. "Round's on me."

"Big spender," Ellen muttered, pulling out the bottle and four glasses and tipping a couple of shots into each with the ease of long practice. She took the glasses to the men and sat on the sofa facing them, taking a long swallow of hers.

* * *

Mary slipped down the back stairs, and went out through the basement door, her feet stinging as she felt the gravel of the drive under them, her nightgown fluttering a little in the breeze from the lake.

She could see him, pale and almost flickering in the darkness under the trees, her heart hammering as she walked steadily to him. She forgot the pain in her feet, ignored the increasing cold in her body as she got closer. She'd missed him, so much. Her mother had taken her and run after that night, run north and west. It hadn't helped. Nothing could fill the hole that had been left inside of her.

"Daddy?"

"Yeah, honey, it's me," he said softly, smiling down at her as she stopped in front of him. "You look beautiful, baby."

"Why are you here, Daddy?" she whispered, seeing now the others, palely shining in the darkness, behind him, around him.

"It's my time, finally," Isaiah said, looking past her at the camp. "Those bastards are here and the Lord has given me my moment of vengeance."

"No, Daddy," Mary said, looking behind her. "No, those men, they died … years ago. They went to prison for what they did and they died there."

"No, honey, they're here, I can feel them," her father said gently. "And it's my time." He looked down at her, smiling. "Let me in, baby, I want to hold you again."

Mary looked down at the ground. Under it, not deep, lay the iron track that the men of the camp had buried. It was a protection … of some kind, she remembered Renee telling her. She couldn't remember what it protected them against right now.

"Can you lift aside the iron, Mary?" Isaiah pressed her gently. "So I can hold you again?"

She nodded vaguely, kneeling in the dirt and the pine needles, her fingers scrabbling through the soft earth, finding the edges. The sections of track were not fastened together and she cleared the length of it, digging furiously, her fingers and hands and arms coated in soil, her nightgown blackened by the clumps she threw back. It was heavy, much heavier than she'd expected although the length was not all that long. Digging her fingers under it, she pulled at it, feeling it shift a little in the earth, sweat beading her face as she dragged in a deep breath and pulled harder.

"That's my girl," Isaiah said, watching her. "Lift it clear, baby."

The rail came clear and she twisted it to one side, letting go and looking down at her hands. They were filthy and aching. She watched her father step through the gap, his hand reaching out to her. She took it, a flickering moment of uncertainty filling her as she felt how cold it was.

"I knew you could do it, honey," he said as he drew her to her feet and wrapped his arms around her. "I love you, baby and I'm so sorry, but it's all for the best, you'll see, I'll be with you again and we'll be in His House, and it will all be just as fine as paint."

She looked up at him, not understanding. He smiled and thrust his hand into her chest, and she felt the cold fingers close around her heart, squeezing it.

"Daddy … no," she said.

"I'm sorry, child," her father said, his hand clenching hard. Mary's heart stopped beating and her eyes stared up at him lifelessly. He let her slowly down to the earth. "We don't have a choice, but it will all be better soon."

* * *

The scream ripped through the night's silence and the hunters jerked in response, turning to look in the direction it'd come from.

"What the fuck was that?" Ellen murmured, putting her glass down and getting up in a long, fluid movement. She was at the window when the spirit appeared next to her, a woman in chainmail, the hiss of a spectral sword sweeping through the air toward her.

"Ellen, DOWN!"

She dropped to the floor as the roar of the shotgun filled the room, salt peppering the curtains as it dissipated the spirit. Boze stood at the doorway, breaking the gun and reloading.

"We've got a bunch of really pissed ghosts in the compound," he said shortly, turning and running back down the hall. Dean, Rufus and Ellen ran for the basement, Bobby pulled out the shotgun that was holstered along the frame of the chair, cursing as he tried to wheel himself back to the office one-handed.

"How'd they cross the iron?" Ellen gasped as she caught the shotgun Rufus threw to her, checking the load and catching the bag of salt in her other hand.

"I don't know," Dean picked up a couple of bags of salt and his shotgun, following Rufus as they came back up the stairs and down the hall. "Ellen, grab everyone you can find, give them the bags, tell them to line everything."

She nodded, heading for the stairs.

"I'll do the back," Dean said to Rufus, turning away. Rufus nodded, heading for the front of the house. He could hear more gunshots, and screams from the compound, and he stopped at Bobby's office, looking past the professor to the hunter, who was awkwardly pouring salt across the windowsills.

"You alright in here?"

Bobby nodded, gripping the edge of the bag with his teeth.

* * *

Dean ran down to the back door, tossing one bag to Renee as she looked over the edge of the kitchen table at him, her eyes wide.

"Salt every door, every window, every vent, thick line," he said, passing into the back room and ripping open the bag in his hand. The salt crystals sparkled in the light as they poured out, the barrier forming across the back door, then the windows of the room. He spun around at the noise in the doorway, seeing Michelle, Lisa and Dominique standing there. "Salt," he barked at them. "Bags in the basement, every doorway and window, every fireplace and vent. NOW!"

They turned and ran and he looked out through the window, dumping the almost-empty bag at his feet. The occupied cabins all had salt bags, he hoped that the people living in them would remember to use them. A flicker in the hall resolved itself into a man's form, long, black frock coat skirling out at the hem as he turned toward him, the mild-featured face twisting into a furious expression as it disappeared and reappeared beside him.

"And vengeance is mine –," it shrieked at him and Dean pulled the triggers, the double load of rock salt blasting through it and leaving a sparkling fall of crystals along the floor. He grabbed another couple of shells from his pocket, shoving them into the barrels as he turned for the staircase.

Running up the stairs, he swore as he heard screaming from the front bedrooms, forcing himself faster. He burst into the bedroom, seeing the youngest children huddled together in one corner of the room, two palely glowing spirits approaching them. The boom of the gun echoed around the room and he grabbed the half-full bag of salt from Faith's hands, tipping a line along the threshold, check and filling the lines across the windowsills.

"Stay here, together, alright?" he said to Faith, looking at the rest of the children. "Stay inside the salt lines!"

She nodded, backing away to crouch beside the others.

* * *

Bobby saw the ghost appear on the other side of the line that sealed the doorway. The man was tall and broad-shouldered, an eighteenth century coat and breeches in plum and forest green velvet distinct against the bright hall behind him.

"More," Jerome Ackers said indistinctly through the silk gag. "I'll be damned."

Bobby's gaze cut briefly to the professor and back to the spirit. "Martyr of God?"

He wheeled himself close to Ackers and yanked the gag out of his mouth.

Ackers nodded, running his tongue around his mouth. "The fifth Seal is broken."

Bobby's eyes narrowed as he registered the words. "What the hell do you know about it, Ackers?"

"You have a copy of the Torah, Singer?"

Bobby nodded sharply.

"Get it, there's a spell." Ackers said. "We need goldenrod, witch-hazel and rowan, black quartz, nine candles, lamb's blood, vervain, yarrow and dirt from a graveyard."

"Goddamn it," Bobby muttered, wheeling himself to the bookshelves that lined the interior wall of the office. "Anything else?"

"Do you have the ingredients?"

"Yeah, I think so." Bobby pulled out the book and tossed it onto the desk. He looked up as Dean rocketed past him. "Dean!"

There was no answer and he could hear the man's boots as he pounded up the stairs.

"Bobby?"

He looked up, seeing Alex standing in the hall. "Get in here, Alex."

She stepped over the line of salt carefully. "What's going on?"

"Fifth Seal," he answered shortly, crossing the room and stopping the chair at the desk. "Keys are here, unlock this guy, would ya?"

She walked to the desk and picked up the cuff keys, unlocking them and unknotting the loose gag from Ackers' mouth.

"Goldenrod. Witch-hazel. Rowan. Black quartz. Lamb's blood. Vervain. Yarrow. Graveyard dirt," Ackers said clearly and distinctly.

Bobby looked at Alex. "There's a shotgun behind the desk, Alex," he said tersely. "There'll be black quartz, yarrow and graveyard dirt in the trunk of Dean's car."

She nodded, picking up the gun and cocking it. "We harvested goldenrod and rowan berries and leaves just before winter. Ellen wanted them. There's vervain in the garden. I think there's extract of witch-hazel in the downstairs bathroom. Will that do?"

Ackers nodded, leaning over to look at the book on the desk. "And nine candles."

Nodding, she turned and hurried out of the room, heading first to the basement. The herbs had been dried and stored with the root vegetables, she remembered. There were plenty of candles in the store rooms. And one of the ewes had had triplets, two days ago.

Coming around the corner of the back room, she stopped dead at the sight of the spectre in front of her. In chain mail, a sword in one hand, the woman's hair had been hacked off, her skin twisted and melted-looking. Burned, she thought in horror. Behind her, there was a scrape of boot sole over the broad boards and the thunder of a shotgun blast filled her ears.

"You see anything, shoot, Alex, don't stand there looking at it," Dean snapped, coming up beside her. "What are you doing here?"

"Bobby has a spell, he needs things for it," she said, shaking her head a little at the ringing that persisted. "He said that there'd be yarrow, graveyard dirt and black quartz in your car?"

Dean nodded. "What else?"

"Lamb's blood," she said.

"Don't have that," Dean grimaced, looking past her to the back door.

"We do, one of the ewes dropped three a couple of days ago," she said, following him to the door. "They're in the barn."

"Okay, stay behind me," Dean said, opening the door and looking around. They stepped out over the line of salt and the door was plucked from Alex's hand and slammed behind them. This time, she brought the barrel up smoothly, pulling the trigger when it was lined up on the figure that flickered beside her. The salt blasted through it and Dean passed her another couple of shells without a word as he skirted the side of the house, running for the garages. Alex followed him, stumbling a little as she tried to get the shells into the gun and run at the same time.

She stopped by the garage door as he opened the trunk, pulling out linen and plastic bags from the well beneath the false lid, grabbing a clean glass jar with a screw-top lid at the same time. He shoved them all into a small canvas bag and handed it to her.

Two of the flickering, pale ghosts tried to stop them as they raced down the drive toward the barn, Dean's shotgun swinging around each time to blast them into non-existence. Alex's wrist was going numb from the weight of her gun as she tried to keep up with his longer stride, clutching the bag tightly against her side with her free hand, running blindly after him.

* * *

The barn was warm and still inside, and Dean went straight to the dozen hessian sacks of salt piled to one side of the door, gun tucked under an arm as he drew his knife and slit through the top, pouring out a wide circle in the centre of the aisle. When it was closed, he dropped the bag and looked at the pens.

"Which one?"

She turned, putting the bag into the salt circle and walking over the sheep pens. The animals crowded into the back corner as she climbed over the rails, her hand flashing out when she got close and gripping the smallest lamb, one arm tucking underneath it as she straightened and lifted it.

Dean took it from her and carried it to the circle, dropping to his knees on one side as she stepped inside with him, forcing the animal's head back, the knife point slipping easily into one side and pushing through. Alex held the open jar beneath the jugular as the blood pulsed out. The smell, sharp and coppery bright, filled the air and she glanced at the restless movements of the other animals, snorting at it, their eyes rolling white in the light of the flashlight.

The jar was full and she pulled it away, screwing on the lid as Dean let the animal down onto the floor. He watched her put the jar into the bag.

"What else?"

"Goldenrod and rowan, vervain, witch-hazel and the candles," she said, zipping up the bag and putting the handles over her shoulder. "We have those in the house."

"Okay, on three," he said, getting to his feet and pulling her up. "One. Two. Three."

They crossed out of the circle and were through the door, accelerating as they headed around the big, concrete tank for the basement door. The door was still shut, the salt line in front and under it intact. She remembered the vervain as they came into the kitchen, pulling the bag from her shoulder and throwing it at him.

"Goldenrod and rowan is in the second store room," she said quickly. "There's a box of candles in there as well."

"Wait a second, where are you going?" he said, turning around as she bolted across the kitchen and opened the back door.

"Vervain's in the garden," she said, looking back over her shoulder at him. "There's a bottle of witch-hazel extract in the downstairs bath."

She stepped over the salt line and lifted the gun as she closed the door behind her. She knew exactly where the medieval herb was growing, down the slope a little and she shot across the porch and down the steps, veering right to the gate, wishing she'd brought the flashlight with her instead of giving it back to Dean.

The garden was still and quiet and the squeak of the hinges of the gate made her jump as she pushed through it, her fingers tight around the barrel and trigger guard. Overhead, the thin clouds that filled half the night sky parted briefly and the moonlight lit the path, and Alex accelerated down to the bed she remembered.

She grabbed a handful of the nearest branch, yanking back on it savagely, and dropping to the ground as she saw her breath whiten in front of her. Clutching the branch against the barrel of the shotgun, she rolled over, her finger finding the trigger and pulling back, the boom of the shot echoing over the lake as the ghost disappeared.

Scrambling to her feet, she raced back to the gate, hearing noises behind her, seeing flickers in the darkness to either side. She hit the back stairs and almost fell up them, fingers scrabbling over the treads in front of her, the stock of the gun knocking against the risers as she tried to go faster.

"Drop!"

The command came out of the darkness in front of her as she reached the top of the stairs, feeling cold penetrate through her jacket, reach into her back, her heart stuttering as if icy fingers had drawn over it. Thunder filled her ears and she closed her eyes tightly, tucking her face into her arm, the iciness disappearing, her heart beat regaining its rhythm.

Thud of boots over the porch boards and she looked up as a hand appeared in front of her face.

"Come on, move it," Dean snarled, his fingers closing hard around her hand as he hauled her to her feet. "Get inside."

She ran through the back door, careful to jump over the salt line, hearing the door slam behind her and then feeling a hand on her back, pushing her forward.

* * *

Bobby looked up as they came into the office, his face ashen. "Is that everything?"

Dean nodded and Alex handed the branch of the vervain to Bobby. Ackers took it and stripped the leaves, crushing them as he added them to the bowl on the desk.

"You have to break the salt lines to the outside, they'll be drawn through the incantation," he barked out at Dean and Alex, turning to look at Bobby.

"When I tell you, drop in the match," he told the older hunter tersely, dragging the book around on the table to read the ritual.

Dean went to the window, sweeping the salt from the ledge as Alex dropped to her knees in front of the door and pushed the line to one side. She looked up as a flicker caught her peripheral vision, throwing herself backwards and the shotgun boomed above her, Dean's hand catching her arm and dragging her back onto her feet.

"_Kedy lhegdeyr at hemnevhh bedrekm, aney qevra leqb"h vemlak havevyer, repal, lhedreyk at hervhevt alh lebyet shelk_," Ackers said, his voice dropping to a deeper level. "Now, Singer."

Bobby dropped the match into the bowl and the contents ignited at once, a pillar of fire reaching to the ceiling and burning with an incandescent, argentine light, too bright to look at. Bobby, Dean and Alex turned away from it, Ackers stared through narrowed eyes at the fire, watching as the spirits that been diverted by a perverted spell of release moved through it and ascended.

The fire vanished and the room filled with the smell of burned vegetation and blood, a sickly smell that turned Alex's stomach.

"God, open a window," Bobby growled, grimacing as he turned away.

Dean walked to the window, looking out as he opened it. "That do it?"

"Yes," Ackers said wearily. "It released them from the spell of the devil."

Dean's brows shot up.

"The devil you don't believe in?" he asked, his tone sardonic.

Ackers shrugged, looking from Dean to Bobby as the hunter stared back. "Alright, not just a professor."

* * *

Dean watched Alex as she stood by the sink, washing her hands free of the strong scent of the vervain. For the short time they'd been trying to deal with the ghosts, she'd looked at him, spoken to him … the awkward defensiveness had gone. He wasn't about to let it resume.

"It was your idea, the, uh, settlements for the Kansas people, wasn't it?" he asked her, walking from the doorway to lean against the counter next to her. She glanced at him briefly and shrugged, staring down at her hands.

"And the other stuff?" he pressed. "Taking out one big team for scavenging, putting all the herbs and trees we need for protection around the place?"

"Just ideas," she said, clearing her throat as the words came out a little hoarsely.

Talking to Chuck, after the last discussion on the settlements, the writer had told him that a lot of the ideas for making things more efficient around the camp had originated with her. He didn't think they could afford to lose her.

He let out his breath, forcing himself to remain patient. Anyone else in the damned camp would've taken credit quickly enough for those ideas, he thought, damping down his irritation. It was just his luck that she wouldn't see it that way.

"You can't hide forever and running doesn't make it any easier," he said, his voice quiet. "Trust me, I know."

She stiffened slightly, leaning forward to turn off the tap, reaching for the hand towel hanging from the rail beside him, drying her hands. He caught her wrist as she turned away and her gaze dropped to his hand, flicking back to his face uncertainly.

"Alex, I - we need you here," he said, keeping a hold on her as she pulled away.

"Don't – don't give me the pep talk, Dean," she said, looking down at his hand, her shoulders tensing. "Just tell me what you want from me."

He looked down at her, unable to see her expression with her head bowed. "I want –" he stopped, the words jamming in his throat.

He wanted things to go back to how they'd been, that easiness between them, where he could ask for her opinion when he needed it, talk about the long range plans, ask about supplies or food or how the goddamned stock were doing and what she thought they needed. He didn't know how to say that.

"We need your ideas," he said instead. "You've got a different –"

"Dean."

He looked around to see Lisa standing in the doorway of the kitchen, her expression slightly strained as she looked at him.

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" she asked.

Looking back at Alex, he saw her relief at the interruption and let go of her arm, keeping his face expressionless as he watched her walk out past Lisa.

"All the kids okay?" he asked Lisa, shifting his gaze to her. She nodded.

"Can we go upstairs?"

Following her down the hall and up the stairs, he wondered if any of what he'd said to Alex would have an impact on her. He pushed the question aside as he looked around on the landing, seeing the hunters and civilians pouring salt lines along the thresholds and window ledges. Ackers had released the spirits, but there wasn't any point to being careless now.

Four had been killed. They'd found Mary's body by the upturned iron track, had reburied the track and taken her body to the pyre near the road with the others. Vance had been killed in his cabin. Haley had been caught by a ghost halfway down the back stairs, the bag of salt in her hands unopened. Simon had been the last, Dean thought, trapped as he'd run for the church, Father Michael coming out too late to save him. Too many casualties for a place that should've been safe, he thought bitterly.

Lisa walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed, looking up at him and he stopped and closed the door behind him, remembering the conversation earlier with Ben and the decision he'd made. He swallowed as he turned around to face her, knowing it was going to be a crap conversation to end the day.

"This isn't working out, is it?" he said, looking at her. "I know you're not happy, Lise, and I'm sorry, I really am."

"Dean …"

"This isn't what I wanted, okay? I didn't want to hurt you or Ben," he continued, taking a step closer. "I didn't want you to think that there was something there, when there isn't. And it's nothing you've done, or said, okay? This just isn't something I can do."

"Dean," she said again. He looked away, his shoulders hunching a little as he tried to think of what he could say that would limit the amount of recriminations he was sure were coming.

"Lise, there's nothing either of us can do about it," he added, turning to look back at her. "I don't … feel the same as you. I don't … love you. I don't think that's going to change, it's –"

"Dean." She cut him off, her eyes steady on his as he stopped talking. "I'm pregnant."


	9. Chapter 9 However Unlikely

**Chapter 9 However Unlikely**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean stared at her, questions crowding every other thought out as Lisa's statement fell onto and through him.

How was one. How the hell was it possible when he'd been careful, had used a condom every single time. The answer was there too … not a hundred percent effective … blah blah blah. He shook himself mentally and pushed the whats and hows and whys aside.

"You sure?"

Lisa nodded. "Took three tests in the last week. I didn't want to say anything without being completely sure."

He didn't know what else to say. Everything he'd thought about his life, this morning, an hour ago, all that had gone with those two words. He opened his mouth to ask her if she wanted this, then closed it again when he realised that if she hadn't, she wouldn't have told him at all.

"It's a big shock, I know," she said, getting up and walking to him. "Took me a while to get used to the idea."

He looked down at her as she stepped close, still unable to think of anything to say, the chaos in his head defeating the brain-mouth connection completely.

"It's fine if you don't want to be … involved, Dean," she said, and for a moment, he couldn't think what she meant by that. "I mean, given what you've just told me, that's perfectly understandable. I didn't tell you to make you do something that you don't want to do. I just thought, well, you seemed disappointed that Ben wasn't, and you know, I didn't want to think it was anyone else. And you deserved to know."

_Deserved to know_. He didn't know what that meant either. His child too, he guessed uneasily, that thought raising emotions he couldn't define, couldn't recognise. At the back of his mind were a hundred things he still had to do tonight, but he couldn't concentrate on them … hell, he couldn't even remember them right now. He took a step back from the woman in front of him.

"I … there are …" he said, gesturing vaguely toward the hallway. "I'm … I've got some, uh, things, you know, I need … to … uh … get done."

Lisa nodded, watching him back away. "Sure."

"I'll see you later," he said, turning and walking to the door, not knowing if he would or not. Sometime later, maybe. Tomorrow, maybe.

As he closed the door behind him, and walked down the hall, the cacophony began to separate out, his reactions, emotions and thoughts unclumping themselves and starting to flow.

_Pregnant_. He hadn't seen that coming. Hadn't ever even considered it. On its own there was no resonance to the thought, no feeling attached to it. But … a child, _his_ child … that brought a surging wave of protectiveness, threaded and woven through with fear and excitement, a tentative, fragile longing, hope and regret, a hint of male pride, worry, disappointment, all those disparate and somehow contradictory feelings growing and expanding and filling him until he realised he was heading downstairs with no particular destination in mind. He stopped midway down the staircase and turned around, heading back up again. He'd wanted to check on the children before he saw Bobby.

The three bedrooms at the front of the house had been given over to them, the orphans that Ellen and Emmett had found and brought with them. Along with the kids who had managed to keep one parent, the camp housed fifteen children under the age of fourteen, and the rooms were crowded with bunk beds, dormitory-style, the kids grouped by age.

He opened the first door quietly and looked in, seeing the nightlight on one wall, its soft glow providing enough light to see the tousled heads of the children sleeping there. Their days were simple, schoolwork at the church in the mornings, gardening and caring for the animals that were now essential to the camp through the afternoons. They had a lot of chores now, he thought, compared to what their lives would've been like if everything hadn't gone to hell. They seemed happy enough, though. He hadn't seen any signs that they didn't all get along, the older ones caring for the youngest without having to be told.

He checked the rooms of the older children, counting heads, listening to the quiet steadiness of their breathing. When he backed out of the last room, he walked back down the hall and headed downstairs, the maelstrom of his thoughts quietened as well and had been pushed back for later consideration.

Ackers was sleeping on the sofa in Bobby's office. The professor had admitted to being more than just a history teacher, had told them that he was, in fact, a member of a secret society that had been considered defunct for centuries. Bobby's questions would have kept them all up through the night, but even he could see that the attack had taken its toll on the man.

Come morning, Dean thought, and Ackers wouldn't get the same consideration. They needed every bit of information anyone had on Lucifer and what was coming, and the older hunters had all told him that the legends of the order of Litteris Hominae told of libraries and knowledge, safe houses for the repository for information, factual, studied, verified – an order of scholars, building an unimaginable compendium of knowledge on the worlds behind the world, the lore on the creatures that haunted and hunted in this one.

He shunted that thought aside for the moment as well, continuing down the hall to the back room behind the kitchen. Ellen, Chuck and Jo were sitting there at the long pine table, a bottle between them.

"Who's on the gate tonight?" he asked, sitting down next to Jo and pouring a shot into a glass.

"Tim and Risa," Ellen said, refilling hers. "We couldn't find any other bodies, a lot of folks remembered their lessons on salt. Everyone's shaken up."

"Understandable," he said, swallowing a mouthful. "Any ideas on protecting the new settlements from that kind of attack?"

"Alex suggested that the prime bearers for the buildings should be steel. There are plenty available, there's a steel works in Saginaw we could get them from," Chuck said, waving a hand in the general direction of the city to the south. "The bearers are pretty much just carbon/iron steel. There's no way demons or ghosts are going to be able to cross them. She thought that the cavities in the walls could be packed as well, iron filings, bags of salt, hex bags even, as we build them. Keep everyone safe."

Dean nodded, seeing the possibilities, wishing he'd been part of that conversation. Her ideas tended to jump-start his own. "Yeah, well, let's start getting that stuff ready to go." He looked at Ellen. "When have you got the next team going out?"

"Early next week. Liev is starting work on the new settlement then so we need to work out who's free to go."

He looked at her tiredly. There were too many fucking projects running at the one time and it worried him that he couldn't oversee them all as thoroughly as he wanted to. As if she'd read his mind, Jo smiled.

"Delegation, Dean," she said, picking up the bottle and pouring a half-inch into her glass. "You're going to have pick some people you can trust to look after some of these things."

He eyed her sourly. She was right. Rufus could handle the supply run, he thought. If Alex was prepared to go with him, he could relax about that. Live, Terry and Chuck could do most of the work on the new camp. Matt was competent to supervise the remaining cabins to be finished here. Boze and Tim could handle the logging side of things, with a crew of people that they could pick.

He leaned forward and looked at Ellen. "We've got five new camps set up, we need to work out whose gonna be running them."

She nodded. "Boze, Maurice, Emmett and Mel, I thought."

Dean chewed on the corner of his lip as he thought about the men. All were highly experienced. None of them would panic or leap to conclusions. They'd stay in touch, pass on what they learned. None of them was the sort to let leadership go to their heads.

"We'll get their thoughts on who else they need, then," he said, making the decision as he thought about it. "They'll need a few different people to make it work."

"Right," Ellen agreed, finishing her whiskey and leaning her chin in her hand as she looked at him. "Seconds they can trust, people with good organisational skills, people who are practical and objective."

"And skilled," Jo added.

Rubbing a hand over his jaw, he agreed silently. More time needed to get people trained into things they'd never thought about before. He doubted somehow that they'd get that time.

He got up from the table. He had another decision to make.

"We'll figure it out tomorrow, get some kind of timetable for this stuff," he said vaguely, looking at the door.

"You okay?" Ellen looked at his expression worriedly.

"Yeah, fine," he answered automatically, looking at the back door. "See you in the morning."

Walking to the door, he felt their gazes on him. He wasn't fine, he thought with a small spurt of sour humour. And the three of them knew him well enough to know that. But there wasn't anything else he could say.

* * *

The night air was cool and refreshing and he filled his lungs as he walked down the lakeshore, through the dappled moonlight filtered through the thin cloud, the crunch of gravel disappearing and his footfalls becoming almost silent on the soft ground and growing grass.

The stump was a few yards from the water, beyond the railing that lined the path to the lowest cabins. It was hidden from the house and from the closest of the cabins, screened by a row of trees and he came here from time to time, when the need to be alone, to sit in silence, drove him away from other people. Sitting on it, he looked at the smooth stretch of water that went to the horizon, the moon's reflection in it sharp and clear.

_Broken. _

He'd failed his brother. No matter which way he sliced it, he couldn't get away from that conclusion. As he'd failed to protect his father or even to keep his promise to him.

That knowledge was like a cancer in him, eating at him when he stopped moving, in the night when he searched for peace in his sleep. For the first month, after being raised by Cas, he hadn't questioned anything but why he'd been picked, why he'd been saved. When the memories of the pit had returned, in greater and greater detail, alive in his flesh and nerves, in his mind, in the aching beat of his heart, other things had intruded. A sacrifice that had been for nothing. A fear that he wasn't what he had been, would never be that man again. Doubt. Despair. And the shattering of a trust he'd held onto his entire life.

_Defeated. _

He was just going through the motions here, he knew. Trying to save people, trying to get ahead of what Lucifer had planned. Not sure of a direction, or that there was a solution but telling himself every single goddamned day that he'd figure it out, that he'd find something that would save Sam, kill Lucifer, return the world to what it had been.

In his heart, he didn't believe anything he told himself. He'd lived in a shadow world for years, seeing the brightness of the real world, the so-called normal world as something he was forever looking at from a distance, as if an impenetrable wall separated him from it. His world had been grey and haunted and filled with evil. That other world seemed filled with light and colours, with safety. He couldn't cross the wall.

Now, there was no other world. No colours. No light. Everything that he thought he'd wanted had already been destroyed and there was nothing but the grey shadows surrounding him. No one here was safe and maybe he wouldn't be able to figure it out, maybe it would keep getting worse until they all died.

He didn't know how to lie down and give up. He'd thought about it, thought about walking – or running, just leaving everyone to their own survival and going somewhere else, north maybe, to wait for the inevitable end without the press and weight of responsibility laying on him. He couldn't. Couldn't turn his back on them. Couldn't've faced himself if he did.

_Dead._

Was he? Dead inside? Incapable now of hope, of being able to see a future for himself, despite that the fact he was working his ass off trying to make one for everyone else?

He didn't know.

Somewhere on the lake a fish jumped, and the small ripples wavered the reflection of the moon's path for a few minutes before it smoothed out again. He stared at the silver track across the water without seeing it, looking inwards, looking for something that would tell him if Famine had told him the truth, or if the entity had just been fucking with him, as they all had.

He didn't know what he felt about Lisa. He cared about her well-being, that she and Ben were safe, fed, could sleep without fear. He didn't think that equated to what people called love. He'd thought, once, that he'd been in love with Cassie. But after seeing her again, that feeling had dissolved as well, no longer holding him by the pain of her denial. He thought they'd had a pretty wild chemistry, between them. A ferocious desire that they could slake in each other. That desire had driven him to try and find a way to a future with her, driven him to tell her the truth about his life, what he did. But he hadn't told her who he was, down inside. And he hadn't asked her to tell him about who she was either.

Maybe there was no such thing, he thought morosely, his head aching with his uncertainties. Just people needing each other and making up feelings and ideas to justify that, the thought continued relentlessly, refusing to go. To make it seem less like need, and more permanent, more dignified. Despite what he'd felt for Cassie, it hadn't occurred to him to give up his life for her. Or to ask her to be with him.

Lisa had told him that she loved him. He was all too aware that she didn't know him, didn't know about his life or what he'd been through or what he'd felt about any of it. He doubted that she would feel the same way if she knew those things. So maybe, the idea of love was just a … a cover. Something she thought she felt, based on what he showed her. What he'd allowed her to see. Not real at all.

A kid, though. That was a different thing altogether. Kids needed love, needed to feel that they were wanted. Rubbing his hands over his face, he closed his eyes, trying to imagine how he could possibly give that feeling to a child.

_His mother had been standing by the kitchen counter when his father had walked in._

Home from the long day of the unknown activities his father did that were known to him simply as 'working'. He'd just turned four, he thought, a vague memory of a big chocolate cake and a couple of other pre-schoolers in the house somewhere there too.

_John Winchester had whistled, low and suggestively, and Mary had turned around, her smile widening as she'd put her hands on her hips, her full lips drawing into a soft pout. He'd watched his father walk to her, his arms wrapping around her as he'd dipped her toward the floor, kissing her lightly at first, the kiss intensifying as it had gone on_.

He'd watched them for a moment before it had all become a bit embarrassing. As a child he hadn't know what he'd been looking at. As an adult, looking back, he could see the things that had shaped his expectations of relationships, of a serious relationship … security in each other's feelings, and the sense of humour that empowered, resulting in the light-hearted play between them; the deep desire that had made him turn away as a child, with a discomforting feeling it was too much for him, too inexplicably grownup to watch; the warm affection masking more intense feelings … he got a sudden, unwelcome momentary image of how they might've looked in the throes of the passion he'd sensed between them and shoved it away uncomfortably.

That memory was his benchmark. And he'd never reached it. Never even gotten close to it.

He had two choices. He could acknowledge the child as his, but keep himself out of its upbringing, leaving it to Lisa, leaving her alone. Or he could be a part of it, be a father and a partner as fully as he could and hope it was enough. Neither was satisfactory. But of the two options, there was only one he could realistically live with.

He got to his feet, turning away from the silvered water and the silence of the woods, and walked back to the house.

* * *

Lisa's eyes opened as she heard the bedroom door opening, her breath held in her throat. She listened to the muted clunks of boots being dropped to the floor beside the bed, the rough whisper of clothes being shed, the rustle of the bed covers drawn back and felt the dip of the mattress as he got in beside her.

For a moment neither moved or spoke. Then Dean rolled onto his side, his hand moving tentatively to her hip, resting there lightly.

"You awake, Lise?"

"Yeah," she said, easing over onto her back, looking at him in the dimness of the room. His hand slid from her side to her stomach, a warm weight on her skin.

"Maybe you should tell me what to expect," he said quietly.

* * *

"Wait a minute," Bobby said, looking across the room at Rufus. "No one has heard of that society for over five hundred years – there's been no verification that it still exists."

Jerome smiled at him. "We learned how to cover our tracks thoroughly after the last persecution, and I'm glad that it was so effective that most hunters think we're a myth."

"Well, I've never heard of you," Dean said tightly, irritated by the man's ready condescension. "How 'bout filling me in?"

Ackers looked at him thoughtfully. "It's Winchester, isn't it?"

"That's right."

"I met your grandfather once," he said, rubbing a fingertip against his temple. "Henry Winchester. He was initiate but he hadn't completed the training."

Dean's brows drew together. "My grandfather was a mechanic, from Lawrence."

"No, he wasn't," Ackers contradicted gently. "The man who raised your father was Ed Landis. But the man who gave him his name, that was Henry Winchester, and he was an initiate of the order." His eyes narrowed slightly as he looked at the younger man. "But you knew that, didn't you?"

"We knew some of it," Dean hedged, looking away, memories of searching for their parents' friends and relatives after Ruby had dropped her bombshell on them flickering in his mind. "Knew that our grandmother remarried in 1960 to Ed Landis. Her husband disappeared in 1958 and no one ever found him."

Ackers nodded. "My father died in 1958, and every member of the society in the central chapter."

"What happened?" Dean asked, curious in spite of the wariness he felt about this man.

Ackers looked across the room at Maggie without answering. "Your mother was a hunter, I think."

She looked at him suspiciously. "She disappeared in 1958 too. Are you going to tell me this is all connected?"

"Oh, my dear, you're going to find, if you live long enough, that everything's connected, every piece has its place in the grand puzzle." He laughed softly. "I met your mother a few times, she came to our house occasionally. You have something of the look of her. She was very beautiful, a very striking-looking woman."

"What do you know about her?" Maggie looked at him, her face stony.

"She was an extraordinary hunter, and an extraordinary woman," he said quietly. "In 1958, the order was looking for information about a prophecy, specifically a prophecy concerning the return of Lucifer to this plane, and his defeat and destruction," Ackers said slowly. "Apparently my father and his colleagues did not keep that quest secret enough. Your mother, Josephine Sands, was the only contact the chapter had with hunters at that time, the only one trusted enough to allow into the meetings that related to that search."

He shook his head slightly. "I don't know how it happened, but from the research I pursued and the evidence I found, I have come to believe that she was possessed by a demon, and the demon used her to gain access to the society. There was a meeting scheduled for the night of August 12 and," he said, turning to Dean. "Your grandfather was supposed to be initiated into the order that night. Josie was invited. She told my father that she had new information on the prophecy."

"Four men were killed at the meeting. Your grandfather disappeared. Josie disappeared," he continued. "Neither were ever heard from or found again. A fire was set to cover the deaths, although even after the remains were found it was plain that the fire was a cover-up. The bodies were torn apart. I spent many years trying to piece together what had happened that night, but I didn't get many answers."

"And you don't know what happened to –" Dean stopped, glancing over at Maggie, "Maggie's mom or my grandfather?"

"No. That night, they vanished completely."

"What about the prophecy, did you get information on that?" Bobby asked.

"Some," Ackers said. "While I had access to the library, I was on my own for ten years, and just a boy when they were all killed. The breaking of the seals on Lucifer's cage was dependent on two men. Neither the first or last seal could be broken without them." He stopped, looking at Castiel. "I discovered that Heaven was aiding Hell in this endeavour. The seals could not have fallen without their intervention, in fact."

The angel looked away. He knew that rebellion had been the cause and the reason for the Morning Star's release. Knew that his brothers had collaborated in putting the two essential men into their appointed places at the right time, guiding them along the path to destruction. There was nothing he could do about it.

"I couldn't find the men in the time I had, and when the virus trapped me in my home, I knew it was too late anyway. The first part of the prophecy had already been fulfilled," Ackers continued. "I have scryed and called for the others, but I've had no responses from anyone else in the society, or any of the hunters that were privy to our work. And then the demons came."

Dean struggled to keep his face expressionless, listening to the man dryly reconstructing the events that had ripped his brother and him apart, forcing them into doing things that they would never have done knowingly, willingly, just pawns in a much greater game than they'd ever imagined. Alastair's voice echoed at the back of his mind, filled with the demon's unhidden glee when he'd been able to tell him that he'd broken the first seal with his weakness. He sucked in a breath through his teeth, forcing it all back and down, down into the dark, covering it, burying it.

"And the second part?" Ellen asked Ackers, keeping her gaze on his face, her fingernails biting into the palms of her hands as realisation filled her. Beside her, Dean was silent, looking at the floor, but she could sense the emotion thrumming through him. Two men. Two seals. Heaven and Hell manipulating the sons of John Winchester until both had been shoved into roles and actions they would have died to prevent.

"That has been harder to discover," Ackers admitted. "Once Lucifer rose, of course, Heaven began to break the Seals of the Covenant, in preparation for the Apocalypse. And with the breaking of each new Seal, there is an increasing chance of destiny being diverted from its original path."

"I thought destiny couldn't be changed?" Dean said thickly, glancing to Castiel and back to Ackers. "That it was fixed?"

"No, nothing is that fixed," Ackers told him. "Free will determines the precise destination for every human soul. And there are always choices. Even Lucifer has choices on what he will do in order to change what is destined to happen between himself and his brother, Michael."

"The archangel, Michael?" Rufus asked softly.

"Yes," Ackers nodded. "Destiny would dictate that Michael threw his brother down before, and will be called upon to do so again."

"But you don't think that will necessarily happen?" Bobby looked at him.

"No, in fact this plague, the success of it, that wasn't predicted. The death of War, another thing not predicted. My belief is that in certain things, perhaps the critical nodes along the way, there are opportunities, windows, if you like, that can take the direction of this path in a new way."

"That sounds shaky," Ellen said doubtfully. "Who gets to choose those?"

Ackers smiled at her. "We do. God gave mankind free will. To make the choices for good instead of evil. To stop evil, if we were that way inclined."

"God hasn't been much help lately," Dean said bitterly. "Why is that?"

"Perhaps, as His children, he believes that we are now mature enough to work it out for ourselves?" Jerome said mildly.

* * *

Alex turned restlessly on the bed, her arm flung out to one side, her face twisting uneasily as the dream pulled her deeper.

_It was the same long marble hall, she thought. She stood beside a broad, fluted column, looking at the smooth floor, a faint and sibilant whispering filling her ears, although she couldn't tell where it came from or hear what was being said._

_She walked a little way from the column warily and stopped as she saw them. Dean was sprawled on the floor, one arm outstretched, the other curled over his abdomen, pressing hard as blood spurted between his fingers and slicked over his hand. Beyond him, the tall man stood, the white suit spattered and splotched with bright red. He held something in his hand, something small and limp and white. Around Dean, a circle of red enclosed him, the thick, sticky line dividing him from a long sword that lay on the floor a few feet from his hand, a sword with a golden hilt and small white flames wreathing around the shining blade._

_She looked at the tall man, suddenly closer to both of them, although she'd had no sensation of moving. She could see what he held now and her gorge rose abruptly, dropping her to her knees and wracking her with bone-deep icy shudders. He lifted his arm, casually tossing the drained infant he held, and she watched in disbelief as the body was caught, high in the air, snatched at and torn into pieces, devoured by flickering half-seen creatures that glinted and shrieked, disappearing again as their laughter faded into silence._

_The tall man fell gracefully to one knee, outside the circle, looking at Dean with a compassion that seemed insanely false after what he'd just done. Alex saw Dean's eyes open, saw him flinch from that look, his face screwed up with pain, his eyes filled with horror._

_Taking a small step toward them, she stopped as the tall man's face lifted and his eyes met hers. They were hazel, she saw, registering the colour distantly. And cold. And curious._

_He got to his feet and took a step toward her and she recognised that he could see her, the knowledge flooding her with an instant and abject terror, rooting her feet to the floor._

"_Who are you?"_

_She turned and ran, the soles of her bare feet slapping on the marble, her lungs burning as she dragged in mouthfuls of air, her muscles aching as she pushed harder and harder to reach the tall double-doors at the end of the room that seemed to be retreating from her the faster she ran._

_In the air above, she heard the snap and crack of leathern wings, the memory of the half-seen shapes that had torn apart the baby driving her harder, legs pumping, breath acid in her throat as she tried to reach the –_

Alex flung herself out of the bed, landing on her hands and knees beside it, her stomach convulsing and the little food and bile left in it rocketing up her throat and spattering across the floor in front of her. Scrambling backwards away from the sour smell of the vomit, she hit the edge of the bed, the contact unexpected and triggering a small involuntary scream. She felt behind her, her fingers recognising the fabric and the square edge of the mattress, and pushed back and up against it, forcing herself to take deeper breaths.

Every image from the dream was still vivid in her memory. Dreams weren't like that, she thought uneasily. They were vivid at the time but those images faded, dissolved a few minutes after waking. The memory of the tall man's eyes was particularly clear. And frightening. They had been alive with excitement, with delight, looking down at Dean in the circle, looking at her. And as coldly inhuman as those of a reptile.

* * *

The day was sparklingly clear, and all around the low rise of the work site the fields stretched out, a brilliant green with strong growth, the small white farmhouses and large farm buildings dotted randomly in their midst.

"Hey, Dean, congratulations!" Liev strode up to him, holding out his hand and grinning widely.

Dean flicked a look at Rufus who shrugged. "On what?"

"Fatherhood," Liev said cheerfully. "Lisa told Matt this morning."

"Oh. Yeah." He shook the other man's hand and forced a smile. "Thanks."

Behind him, he heard Rufus' very soft snort as Liev turned away, leading them across the solid stone and steel foundations of the main building, explaining what they were doing there.

He looked back over his shoulder at Rufus and Alex, hissing at them from the corner of his mouth. "Everyone know already?"

Rufus nodded. "I think so, four people have already asked me what a good engagement present would be."

Scowling, Dean followed Liev up the interior stairs to the second floor, the carpenter pointing out the defensive features of the hill.

"Alex?"

The soft-burred voice came from behind her as she started up the stairs after the men and she stopped, turning around to see a tall, wheaten-haired man standing behind her, a broad-brimmed hat held in one hand. His face was tanned, blonde stubble catching the light as he looked up, bright blue eyes crinkling in a smile.

"Yes?"

"Uh, I'm Dave Patterson, Ellen told me to see you about getting some equipment for the farm?" he said.

"Sure," she said, pulling a notebook from the wide front pocket of her jacket and coming down the stairs again. "What do you need?"

"I thought it might be easier to show you," he said diffidently, pointing at the barn a few hundred yards down the western slope. "We'll need a lot of things that you can usually get from a feed store, but I'm not sure there'll be any left around here."

"Probably not," she agreed, following him to a pick up and getting in. "You're a farmer?"

"Was," he said, closing her door and walking around the engine to get in on the driver's side. "Guess I'm gonna be again."

"I wanted to ask someone if it's worthwhile baling the hay, or if we should be making haystacks instead for the animals' winter feeds?"

"Depends on the animals," Dave said slowly, starting the engine and driving down the dirt track from the settlement alongside a field and into the farm yard of the nearest farm. "Horses are fussy about their food, so're goats. Sheep and cattle not so much, haystack's fine for them."

"What about the quality we need for milking animals?"

"Probably best to bale about half the fields for dairy as well," he said, pulling up in front of the barn and turning off the engine. "You done much farming?"

"No, not at all, really," she said, opening her door and getting out. "My father had a smallholding, a bit south of Grand Rapids. Mostly it just kept us, and he worked the winter in town."

Dave nodded. "This isn't much different."

She laughed a little, walking beside him to the barn. "Well, it is, you know."

"Well, it ain't, you know," he said with a smile. "Same shit on a larger scale."

* * *

Dean turned around as Rufus came up beside him, peering past the older hunter irritably. "Where's Alex?"

Rufus turned around and they looked down the stairs, seeing her get into the pickup parked at the edge of the gravel road and heading toward the farm buildings. "Who's that?"

Liev glanced at the truck. "Dave Patterson, our one and only farmer. He's a good guy, knows a bit about everything, puts his back into every job. He had a list of things he needed to get the farm going efficiently and I sent him to Ellen, guess she told him to talk to Alex." He turned back to the lake, waving a hand at the shore. "Now that landing, it's just temporary at this moment, we'll bring the logs across to the inlet and drag them up to the staging area."

Dean turned away from the stairs and nodded, forcing his attention back on the builder. "Maurice is ready to start cutting. The wall around this … can we make it a double wall? Pack the cavity like we're doing with the walls of the buildings?"

"That's the plan," Liev said straight away. "Gives the patrols something to walk along, protects the salt from leeching and dissolution, protects the iron from rusting out too quick." He gestured to the trench that had already been dug from the slope. "On the outside, we'll have as much razor wire as we can scavenge, and we can run a charge through it as well, I think. Vincent told me that you have to electrocute some monsters?"

"Yeah, rawheads," Dean said, wincing inwardly a little at the memory. "Shouldn't see too many this far north."

"Well, it'll give the croaties something to think about as well," Liev said with a shrug. "Uh, Bobby said Boze was probably going to be taking this settlement on?"

Rufus nodded. "That's the plan so far."

"I'd like to stay on here as well, if that's alright?" the dark-haired carpenter said. "It's central for the others and good for materials."

"Doesn't worry me where you're bunking, so long as we can get in contact easily," Dean said.

"Thanks, good."

"Where's the next one going to be?" Dean asked, glancing back at the barn and the pickup still parked in front of it.

"On the other side of the lake, in between the two lakes and the forest," Liev answered, pointing to the north east. "Mostly hunters, like Chitaqua, I think Ellen said."

Dean nodded distractedly. "How long till it's up?"

"Foundations are already dug," Liev said with a smile. "Once we have more labour, the rest will go pretty fast. Not much skill needed putting in posts and concreting them or bolting together steel frames."

"Yeah, well don't forget these people we're getting out, they've been slaves for nearly a year, they ain't gonna have the strength and stamina that the rest of us have," Rufus said quietly.

"No, but it doesn't take long to get that back," Liev said. "And working on something that's for you and yours, that brings a buzz like nothing else."

Dean and Rufus left Liev on the second storey, walking down the stairs together, looking around at the progress already made on the place. It would cover a half a mile per side, approximately, the trench for the stockade wall already dug and the foundations laid for the major buildings, and quite a few of the minor ones.

Enough room for five hundred people, Liev had said. Looking around, Dean couldn't see it. Every building would be two or more storeys, he remembered, visualising the plans he'd been shown and half-closing his eyes as he projected the heights onto the flat ground he was looking at. That would have an impact. The two biggest were being built along two sides of the rise, partly to provide shelter from the prevailing winter winds, partly to provide a shielded defence.

"What's Franklin say about Wichita?" Rufus asked, seeing Dean's gaze stray to the barn again as they walked slowly back to the truck.

"He was happy with the locations we checked. Says the Stingers have a solid three mile range if we can find high enough ground," Dean said, ducking his head and staring at the ground as he recalled the ex-soldier's comments. "We'll have a shooter, a spotter for targeting and a driver to get them the hell out as fast as possible once they've hit their targets."

"How many teams?"

"Three."

"And on the other side?" Rufus stopped by the truck and leaned against the cab, looking at him.

"You and me'll go in first. Lock down that admin building, bless the tank, set off the sprinklers and play the exorcisms," Dean said, his eyes becoming a little unfocussed as he visualised the locations they'd seen in the city and the plan he thought would take care of them.

"Then we'll daisy-chain some Semtex through the aircraft. On our go, Jo, Maurice, Vincent, Michael, Ty, Emmett, Max and everyone else will cross over to the airport, hijack the buses, take out the drivers – or offer them a trade if they're not possessed – and pick up the slaves without letting on that anything's different."

"You think we can offer enough to those people who're working for Lucifer voluntarily?"

Dean shrugged. "We can offer freedom," he said. He had his doubts about how many would consider that a worthwhile exchange.

"Timing's going to be interestin'," Rufus commented.

"Yeah," Dean agreed. "Franklin, Mel, Maggie and Rona are gonna have to take out the buildings to the north west and the substations at exactly the same time, but we'll have radio contact with them. Once they're done, they head west and south and we'll see them back here sometime." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, brows drawn together as he considered the exodus. "We can get everyone about ten miles out of Wichita, and the buses can split up and take every back road they can find into Nebraska and Missouri and then start heading east."

"Cakewalk," Rufus commented. Dean looked at him, the corner of his mouth lifting.

"There aren't too many places it can get truly fucked up, but ours is one of them," he said warningly. "Ninjering in without setting a single alarm is going to be a bitch."

"Yup," Rufus agreed readily. "Still, that's why they pay us the big bucks, right?"

Dean snorted.

Rufus looked around. "We waiting for Alex?"

"Think we should go over there and get her?" Dean asked.

"She can probably hook a ride with Matt if she's busy," Rufus said, shaking his head.

Dean looked across the field at the barn. "We can go over, see if she's going to be a while."

He walked around to the driver's side of the truck and got in. Rufus watched him for a moment before he opened his door and climbed in.

"So, since we're not on the subject, what is a good engagement present for you and Lisa?" he asked as Dean started the engine. He saw Dean's fingers tighten for a second around the wheel, his profile hardening slightly against the blue sky through the window behind him.

"That a touchy subject?" Rufus asked curiously. "I thought you'd be … a bit more … enthusiastic."

Dean flicked a sideways glance at him. "Not really that kind of situation."

"Oh."

He leaned back in the seat, looking through the windshield as Dean put the truck into gear and followed the dirt track between the fields to the barn.

* * *

He parked the truck behind the blue pickup as Alex and Dave came out of the barn, her head bowed over the notebook she was still writing in. They watched as Dave looked from her to the truck, lifting a hand to them, then turned back to Alex, his comment bringing a smile as she looked up and nodded in their direction.

Walking toward them, Alex stopped by the farmer's pickup for a moment, flicking back through the pages of her notes and asking the man beside her something. Dave grinned at her and bent suddenly, picking a handful of wild flowers from the grassy verge beside the vehicle and handing them to her with a slightly off-balance bow. Rufus smiled slightly as he saw the line of red rising up her throat.

"Must have hit the right button to get that response," he said to Dean.

"Yeah." Dean started the engine, looking down at the dash.

Alex walked over to the truck and Rufus got out, climbing back in after her as she slid along the long seat to the middle.

"You got an admirer, Alex?" he said, grinning down at the flowers in her hand.

"I wouldn't go that far," she said, tucking the stems in between the back cover of the notebook and the last page and opening it to her notes. "Is there time before Wichita to do another run to Grand Rapids?"

"What do you need?" Dean asked, watching the road as they came back to the gravel leading past the new settlement to the town.

"Farm machinery parts, heavy engine oils, spares of everything, seed …" she read down the list she'd made with Dave. "Most farms have a lot of spares, but that depends on how expensive the parts are, usually. That one has a combine, it's in good shape, and it's been looked after, but it's got a lot of moving parts, and it needs a lot of TLC to keep it running without problems."

"Do you need to go, or can anyone make the run?"

"Uh, well, Dave can't go, this is the busiest time of year for him after harvest. I'm not really doing much at the moment," she said, her finger fanning the pages of the notebook lightly.

"Yeah, well, Ellen needs a hand with working out who's going to which of the camps," Dean said flatly, the truck speeding up as they hit the blacktop.

"That can wait a week, surely?" she asked, looking at Rufus. "I mean, they're not nearly ready yet?"

Rufus looked past her to Dean and shrugged. "I don't mind doing a one-off. We go tomorrow, we'll be back by Sunday."

"Fine."

"Fine," Rufus said mildly, glancing at Alex. "Get going after breakfast?"

"Sure."

* * *

_**Three days later.**_

"Dean, get the truck," Bobby snapped, wheeling the chair out from behind his desk.

"What?"

"We're goin' fishin'," he said, gesturing impatiently to the door.

"Bobby, we don't have time to fuck about here," Dean said, backing up as the wheelchair advanced toward him.

"You been as mean as a spring grizzly the last three days," Bobby said, pushing his cap back slightly as he looked up at the younger man. "And what we don't have time for is mistakes, so … get the damned truck."

"Bobby –"

"Does this sound like a damned request, Dean?"

The wheelchair was six inches from his knees, Bobby staring up at him belligerently, and he turned to the door, opening it and heading for the front door, hearing the whirr of the thin rubber tyres following him.

* * *

"Where are we going?" Dean looked at Bobby as he headed up the drive and lifted a hand to Risa and Duncan on the gate.

"Just head north on the twenty-three and I'll tell ya when to stop."

"Fishing? Really?"

"Drive," Bobby growled, pulling his cap down over his eyes as they bounced over the gate track.

* * *

"Gimme that box, no, the other one," Bobby said, manoeuvring the chair close to the river's edge and looking back over his shoulder. He wanted to be in the middle, in the slow, steady current, but that wasn't possible any more. He'd bet experience over location that he'd catch them enough for dinner, even if Dean didn't make a single strike.

Dean brought over the box, walking cumbersomely in the waders Bobby'd dug up from somewhere and insisted he wear, and looked at the thin, flexible rod mistrustfully. Sitting on the edge of a dock, that was one thing. Walking out into the middle of the river, and playing a game with the fish, that was something else.

"You were going to tell me the point of this?"

"Patience."

"I'm patient," he protested. He'd been doing nothing but being patient for the last eleven months, he thought sourly.

"What's bugging you?"

The question took him by surprise. "Nothing."

"In a pig's ass," Bobby growled. "You been prowling around lookin' like someone killed your dog, making everyone jumpy, snapping at folks … not like you, Dean. So, what's wrong?"

Dean looked at the river. "We're going to try and pull over a thousand people out of a demon slave camp, Bobby. We're outnumbered about twenty to one, and when we get 'em out, we still have about four hundred miles of enemy country to get through to bring them here." He turned back to look at the hunter. "You don't think I've got a few good reasons for being a little on the stressed side?"

"You never stress about jobs unless they involve Sam, Dean," Bobby countered quietly, tying the flies and handing him his rod back.

"Yeah, well, this time I am," Dean said, looking down at the waders that enclosed his legs and body to the chest. "How deep am I supposed to go?"

Bobby smiled. "Where the fish are, idjit." He pointed to a series of eddies to one side of the main flow. "Go down a little from those, and cast upstream."

Dean nodded and walked slowly into the water, grimacing slightly at the peculiar feel of the water rushing past him, but his feet and legs remaining dry. When he reached the spot he thought Bobby had meant he turned slowly to look back, seeing the nod of the baseball cap on shore. He cast out the line, watching it follow the current, bobbing and dipping in the moving swirls along the surface, winding in the line gently and recasting when it came parallel to him.

After a few minutes of doing nothing but that, his world had narrowed right down to the water, the line, the feel of it through the sensitive rod, the bubbling noise of the river, the soft sough of the breeze in the treetops on either side of him, the patches of warmth on his bare skin where the dappled sunlight reached through the canopies and touched him … and when the fish struck some unidentifiable time later, it took him several seconds to realise that he was supposed to do something about that.

Play with it, he thought, feeling the weight at the end of the light line. That was the name of the game here, play until it's tired out. He watched the end of the line where it cut through the water for a short time, then closed his eyes, moving by feel instead, this way and that, winding the line when the fish got closer, letting it out as it pulled away, keeping it within a certain set of boundaries. After a minute or an hour, he couldn't work out which, he could feel the movements slowing, becoming more jerky as the steelhead started to give up.

When he'd reeled it right in, he bent, sliding his fingers beneath the gills and lifting it out of the water, turning to look at Bobby with a triumphant grin. Bobby grinned back, gesturing to the stony beach behind him … four more good-sized fish lay there, and Dean's grin fell slightly.

His was the biggest, he thought, feeling the weight in his fingers. He waded back to the shore, freeing the line and laying it next to the others, and turned around and walked back out.

* * *

When the light faded to that particular shade of mauve-grey where everything was soft and undefined and formless, he turned from the river, surprised to see that Bobby had lit a fire, and the air was filled with the scent of roasting fish. Glancing back at the moving water, he wondered at its spell. For hours, he'd stood there, concentrating on the line but not really … his head felt clear, for the first time in days.

He unbuckled the straps that lay over his shoulders, pushing down and stepping out of the waders and leaving them draped over a rock, and walked to the fire, crouching down and breathing in the scent of their dinner.

"So … what's going on with you?" Bobby asked again, his voice quiet enough to almost blend in with the rushing river, with the soft noises of the twilit forest.

Dean looked at the flames for a moment, then shook his head. "Nothing, I'm fine."

He heard Bobby's snort behind him.

"Well, you're not 'fine', son."

Thinking about that, he couldn't disagree. He wasn't fine. But there wasn't anything he could do about it.

"Surprised me, you jumping into becoming a dad, like that," Bobby said a moment later. Dean looked around at him.

"You thought I'd just bail?"

"No," Bobby grimaced. "No, but I didn't think you'd deliberately chose a life that's going to be a lie from day one. Lying all the time doesn't sit easy on you."

Dean looked away, settling back to lean against a boulder.

"Look, I'm sure Lisa's a nice person, Dean, but you haven't told her anything, have you?"

"No." Dean looked at the fire fixedly. "And no, I'm not going to."

"You think that's going to make a successful relationship?"

"Doesn't matter what I think, Bobby," he said. "It only matters that this kid has a family."

Bobby sighed, gesturing to the fish. "Lift that off, would ya?"

Dean leaned forward, lifting the fish from the fire and setting it onto the enamelled plate Bobby held out. He lifted the second one on.

"My mother got knocked up," Bobby said, scratching his beard and looking down at the embers glowing within the ring of stones. "Married the sonofabitch so's I'd have a dad."

Dean looked down at the fish, listening intently.

"He was a piece of crap, from go to whoa. Mean drunk, free with his hands, hated being tied down, couldn't keep a job and took it out on us."

Looking up at him, Dean's mouth twisted up. "You think I'm gonna turn into that?"

"No," Bobby said gently, smiling. "Not a chance. But you'll turn into something. Something you don't wanna be. Something you know isn't you."

Dean passed the plate to the hunter, hunching up slightly. "Maybe I'll figure it out, Bobby."

"Maybe," Bobby agreed sadly.

"The fishing …was a good idea, Bobby," Dean said, lifting the second fish off as the skin began to curl away. "But we'll head back tomorrow."

Bobby nodded. He'd found it a way to get things clear in his head, the juxtaposition of physical and mental where neither really touched the other. But it would take more than a couple of days of standing in the river and watching it go by to get everything figured out in Dean's head. There were things that the younger man wouldn't even admit to yet, maybe not even to himself. And none of it was helped by the next thing on the horizon, the next job, the next task, the next enormous load of responsibility.

* * *

_**Two days later.**_

The long dining room was surprisingly intimate at night. Dean looked up from his plate as Emmett pulled out a chair for Ellen, pushing it back as she seated herself and taking the chair beside her.

"Ellen, did I mention how beautiful you look today?" The tall hunter said with a grin.

"Emmett, you oughta know that it'll take a lot more than pretty words before you get anywhere with me," Ellen replied tartly, picking up her fork and waving it at him.

He laughed and passed her the basket of bread rolls. "Don't tell me it's gunna be all diamonds and vacations on the Riviera?"

To Dean's left, Bobby made a noise in his throat as he ate. Dean glanced at him, unable to see his expression. Down the length of the table, Maggie was talking Jerome in a low voice, Max was arguing with Father Michael, Jo was talking to Vincent, Michael on her other side, staring at his plate, Ty and Maurice and Boze were discussing something, using the condiments and bowls to illustrate some tactic or plan.

He felt Lisa's gaze on him and turned to look at her.

"You okay?"

He nodded and started eating again. She was in the middle of his world, surrounded by hunters, had survived the virus and seen monsters. And she'd never asked him, about his past, about what had happened in the time between.

* * *

Candlelight flickered slowly against the cream walls, making shadows jump along the smooth, tan skin under Dean's mouth as he traced the underside of her breast with his tongue.

Lisa lifted her arms, head turned and eyes closed, arching up to him. His hand slid down her body, following the curves, and she jerked against him, a soft moan reverberating in her chest, sending a lazy throb of arousal through him.

There was never a slow build, no languid exploration, no tender drawing out. Her hips drove up against his, demanding, legs curling around his back and nails digging into his shoulders and he closed his eyes, thrusting hard, concentration on the sensation that spiralled outwards, crackled along the nerves, contracted his muscles. He felt the fast ripples inside of her flicking up him, let them push him over, relinquishing control with a long exhale and an odd sense of not-looked-at relief that he tried to ignore.

Rolling off, he lay back against the pillows, feeling his heart rate settling quickly to a steadier rhythm, his body loose and heavy and tired. Lisa shifted closer, her arm slipping over him, her breath huffing against his skin.

"Can I ask you something?" he said, looking down at her.

She lifted her head from his shoulder, looking at him. "Sure."

"What is it … uh … that you see in me?" he stumbled over the words, the question surprisingly difficult to get out.

"I see a good man," Lisa answered promptly, and he felt a small mistrust at the speed of her answer. "You care about people. You don't let them down."

He closed his eyes. "I've let a lot of people down, Lisa."

"Not that I've seen," she said, moving closer to him. "You got us here, you've kept everyone fed and safe and taught them how to do that for themselves."

"With a lot of help," he said, frowning at the simplistic image she'd painted.

"Help that you found," Lisa said, shrugging slightly. "That's what I see."

What she saw, he wondered? Or what she wanted to see? The thought irritated him a little.

"You've never asked me about what I've done, what's happened in my life," he said slowly, not sure exactly of what he wanted to know.

He felt her sigh, shoulders lifting and falling under his arm. "I thought you'd tell me anything you thought was important."

He didn't have an answer for that. He hadn't asked her much about the intervening years, but it hadn't been from not wanting to press her. He just hadn't felt a desire to know.

"When you saved Ben," she continued. "And you told me that that was what you did – hunting monsters, I mean." She paused for a moment. "I wanted you stay, for a while anyway. You told me it wasn't your life, you remember?"

He nodded.

"When you'd gone, I felt relieved." She moved back a bit, propping herself on her elbow to look at him. "I tried to pretend that I wasn't for a long time, but I was. I thought that if you weren't around, I wouldn't have to know about the things that scared me. Cowardly, huh?"

"No. There've been times I didn't want to know what I know," he said.

"Maybe," she hedged. "But since we've been here, I've thought about it a bit more. If you want to talk about something, I'll listen. But really, I'm happy to just know you from now, I don't really want to know about the other monsters and that stuff. It's not … I can't think about that and keep my sense of hope that one day, it'll be alright."

She wriggled down again, and he felt her lashes brush his skin as she closed her eyes.

It was an answer, he guessed. He wasn't sure why the fact that she didn't want to hear about his past anymore than he wanted to tell her about it made him feel so alone.

* * *

_**Las Vegas, Nevada**_

Under the cold white lights that lined the ceiling, everything in the long narrow room gleamed. Polished metal, white and clear plastics, glass and ceramics winked and shone from sparkling stainless carts. The white-tiled floor was spotless, except around the examination table. There, the pools and droplets and arcs of red and the formless piles of unrecognisable flesh brought colour to the otherwise colourless room. Bright arterial red, darker wine reds, the madder tones of the organs and the pale pinks and browns of skin, forming a rather artistic contrast, the Horseman thought.

On the table, the man moaned and shrieked, words occasionally emerging, the same ones over and over. In a gore-spattered white coat, the demon adjusted the clamp and began to excise the flesh around the groin.

"Michigan!" The word bounced from the hard walls and floor, the last syllable rising to a scream. "Winchester!"

The Horseman smiled slightly and turned away, closing his eyes. He was very tall, with a square face, the temples and cheeks hollowed out, high forehead shining palely under the fluorescent lights. Broad-shouldered, he was also thin, dark green trousers and white button down shirt, under a pale green knitted woollen vest and white doctor's coat, hanging from his frame, bony wrists and delicately long-fingered hands clumsy-looking as he clasped them together in front of him.

The man who'd destroyed his brothers was holed up in an old summer camp near the shores of Lake Huron, in Michigan. Behind him, the voice of the man who'd once been a part of that camp disappeared in a series of croaks and gasps and bubbles as the demon worked on his throat. He'd been helpful, believing the sweet lies of the demons who'd found him, wandering on the outskirts of Detroit, lies of riches and fleshly pleasures in abundance. The Horseman sniffed disinterestedly. All humans were ready to believe in what they wanted. It was a weakness too easily exploited to be either entertaining or worthy of further thought.

Stretching out his awareness, he searched for the children of the virus, feeling the conduit open between himself and their contaminated blood. More had survived the first bloodrage than he'd thought. And he was already seeing signs of the timed mutation, months before it was due, the virus more efficient than he'd counted on. Such were the delights of working with nature, the most efficient of all designers, ensuring every species survival and propagation.

In a few months he wouldn't be able to sense them at all, he knew, the demonic plasm that had been transferred into their systems along with the living virus would have been burned out, leaving only the virus, with its series of planned evolutionary mutations, in their systems. They would no longer react to the things that a demon reacted to and they would walk invisibly amongst the remaining population, a bomb that would tick its way to the final solution for the angel who'd begun it all.

But, for now, he could still feel them, could still drive them to his bidding. The winter had taken its toll on the living populations along the coast, and the unforeseen side-effect, the cannibalism that had risen and stayed even in those with access to other food, had also cut a swathe through their numbers. It didn't matter. There were plenty left and they were increasing those numbers gradually, every child born to an infected mother carrying the virus within them.

He instilled the compulsion in them gently, an insinuation, an idea that would grow and become an obsession, driving them west before it. It would take time, he knew, but there was time. Lucifer's plans were proceeding, and Heaven had been dragging its collective heels. Two more Seals to go before the Host could cross over. Two more Seals and thousands more deaths.

He concentrated on a larger group, gathered near a large lake. Then he was standing there, on the shore of the lake, invisible, unable to smell or taste or touch, but perfectly capable of seeing and hearing.

From the woods on the far side of the lake, he watched another group emerge slowly, looking across the water. Between their diet and the constant, ongoing effects of the virus, the creatures no longer bore any resemblance to human beings. Their skin was grey, dirt ground into the pores, embedded in the creases, and sagging from their skeletons. Eyeballs had receded into the sockets, the whites coated in red, the irises darkened until the original colours were indistinguishable. Fingernails and toenails had grown, long and thick and hard, and he noticed that many of them had filed them into points, along with the teeth that hadn't rotted out of their jaws. Their hair was long, filthy and snarled and matted with dirt and blood and other, less recognisable, substances.

The group that was working its way around the lake shore began to run, grunts and cries and shouts clearly audible across the water. Turning his head, he watched the group next to him, saw them begin to pick up crude weapons and raise them.

_No._

The whisper slipped into their blood and cooled the rage, several men stumbling to a halt as they forgot what they'd been doing.

_Friends._

Both groups walked toward each other now, weapons lowered, the stiffness falling away from their shoulders and backs.

_Together._

The Horseman watched as they met, looking at each other warily, the two leaders stepping out from the others to face each other. After a moment, they turned away, the smaller group following the larger back to the camp site.

_West and north. Inland sea. Along its shores. All together. All friends._

The groups gathered up their few possessions, turning together and starting to walk, north and west.

Disappearing from the lake, the Horseman felt his consciousness reabsorbed into the vessel in the laboratory. He registered the cessation of noise from the man on the table and turned around to look. The demon held up the larynx before dropping it to the floor.

"Just a couple more things, I think," the Horseman said with a smile, walking to the table.

The demon stepped back hastily. Leaning over the man, Pestilence gripped the man's bare shoulder tightly and breathed into his open mouth.

"It's Jake, isn't it?" he asked brightly, looking into the man's eyes. Jake stared back at him, blinking once.

"Well, Jake, it'll take a couple of days for those to really kick in," the Horseman added, looking over the rest of his body. "But I don't think there's anything too fatal here, you should last about a week. You'll be meeting my children, somewhere around Toledo, I think. Don't worry about transport, it's all laid on."


	10. Chapter 10 The Wichita Offensive

**Chapter 10 The Wichita Offensive**

* * *

_**US-23 N, Michigan**_

Rufus tilted his head slightly, listening to the distant rising chorus of wolf music. They'd seen a few more around, especially up to the north. Without the farmers and ranchers, and with all the loose stock, he thought that the predator populations would keep increasing until the new balance was reached. Another reason to train everyone in shooting and hunting.

The little house was on the outskirts of a small town. They'd picked up all the parts and lubricants Dave had asked for, and had gone back to the pharmaceutical warehouse that Alex had visited before with Dean.

"_What are you looking for?" he'd asked her as she'd gotten out of the truck, heading for the docks._

"_Vaccinations," she'd told him, climbing the stairs and disappearing into the stacks of boxes._

"_Why?" he'd called out softly, following her. _

"_Renee asked me to get the childhood ones, and I thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to have as many as possible – the bacterial and viral vectors rarely disappear, even if there are no hosts available for a long time. It would be a shame to survive Lucifer and the Apocalypse and demons and monsters, only to lose half our people in a preventable epidemic, don't you think?"_

He couldn't argue with that, and now the truck was loaded with boxes as well as agricultural parts. He wondered if Bobby or Dean or Emmett would've thought of the vaccinations and prevention of disease. He hadn't. Bobby might've considered it, he thought. But for the others, the list of problems they had right in front of them tended to take up all their free time, and problems for the future were all on the back burner.

The house was quiet enough to hear the soft moans when they started, and he got up and walked down the dark hall to the living room, seeing Alex moving restlessly on the couch. He shook her shoulder and she sat up immediately, wide eyes looking at him.

"Just a nightmare," he said softly.

"Yeah." She wiped a hand over her face and back through her hair. "Thanks."

He nodded and turned away, moving back down the hall to the back of the house. A few minutes later Alex came out, holding two cups.

"I can take over, if you want to get some sleep," she offered, sitting next to him.

"Nah, I don't need much," he said. He took the second cup she offered him.

They sat companionably enough together, listening to the night, the insects sounds and the breeze that quietly rustled the leaves in the trees that lined the street, drinking the coffee without feeling the need for conversation. Rufus glanced at Alex a couple of times, watching her profile as she stared into the darkness, sometimes watching the sky, sometimes the shadows pocking the buildings and yard in front of them, her face still.

When she put the cup down beside her, he turned to look at her. "You want to try for some more sleep?"

She shook her head. "Not really."

"You still dreaming about the ghoul attack?" he asked her, feeling both curiosity and concern.

"No," she said, not looking at him. "They make guest appearances in other dreams, sometimes, that's all."

As if sensing his next question, she forestalled it. "You have nightmares, Rufus?"

She caught the flash of his teeth in the darkness. "All the time, benefit of a lifetime full of crap, Alex."

"Reliving the good times, right?" she said lightly, and heard his low chuckle.

"Right," he said, deciding to change the subject. "Dave seems to be pretty good guy."

"Yeah," she said warily, not looking at him. "He seems to be a very good guy."

"No interest there?"

She sighed. "No, not really."

"Someone else you're thinking about?" he asked casually, setting his empty cup down beside him. He felt her gaze on him for a moment, resisting the impulse to meet her eyes.

"No," she said slowly, wondering at the questions. Rufus made observations about things occasionally, but he didn't ask personal questions. "Why?"

"Just wondered," Rufus said, glancing at her.

"Well, no." She picked up her cup, turning it around in her hands. "Things are too complicated already without trying to add more."

He laughed softly. "Doesn't have to be complicated, Alex."

"Are you hitting on me, Rufus?" she asked wryly, turning to look at him.

"You think I'm having a mid-life crisis, Alex? Making passes at women half my age?"

"I saw you looking at the Corvette, back in Grand Rapids," she said knowingly, hiding a smile as he played along.

"Yeah, you got me there," he admitted, his smile fading slightly.

"Don't worry about me, Rufus," she said softly, holding her hand out for his empty cup. "I'm fine."

He handed it to her and watched her get up, going back through the house. She wasn't fine, he thought prosaically. And she wouldn't talk. And he still couldn't tell if what he suspected was there. Dean stonewalled when he didn't want to talk about something, the not-talking as obvious an answer as an actual answer would've been, but Alex danced away through words, leaving him unsure if what he'd thought about her was there at all.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Dean drove up the newly graded gravel road, the tyres popping and crunching loudly under him and looked around at Ellen's audible exhale.

"I can't believe they've done this so quickly," she said.

The perimeter wall was in place, a solid double barrier of upright logs, rolls of razor wire glinting in the sunlight at the top. They could see Liev and Boze standing on the narrow catwalk behind the … battlements, Dean guessed they'd have to call them, talking and gesturing toward the lake. Visible beyond its twenty-foot height were the top storeys of the buildings the compound contained, steeply pitched and roofed in iron, windows shining and reflecting sky, lake and forest.

The camp had only one gate, the road rising up to it. He nodded as he saw Boze look down at them from the top of the wall above the road, and the welded sheet iron rumbled back into the slot that held it when opened. Driving slowly through, he glanced at the edge, brows rising slightly as he realised that it was a foot thick, the iron strapped over a solid hardwood core.

Ahead, the road curved gently across the contour of the slope, buildings to either side, many no longer just the frames over the foundations, now clad and sealed, roofs and windows and doors all in place. More than half the buildings had been finished and he pulled up in front of the biggest, turning off the engine and getting out, meeting Boze at the bottom of the steps leading up to the wide veranda.

"Dean, Ellen," the big-framed blonde hunter said, grinning at them. "Whaddya think?"

"I think you guys have been working your asses off," Ellen said, climbing up the steps beside him and stopping at the top to pivot slowly on her heel, her gaze taking in the entire compound.

"That would be the understatement of the year," he agreed, gesturing to the open door. They walked inside, looking around.

"Walls are nearly two foot thick, packed with iron filings, salt and enough giant, economy-sized hex bags to ward off a battalion of ghosts," he said, stopping inside the two storey hall. "Liev carved the devil's traps into the ceilings and floors at every entrance and Caitlin's made panels for every window." He pointed to the tall, narrow windows to either side of the doorway, lead-light styled designs in the centre of them, sigils of ward and protection against angels with the Enochian characters, against demons, the designs from the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon, the Star of David, the Star of Solomon, pentacles and hexagrams and arcane circles, each wrought in salt-tempered glass and cold iron.

"Thought we'd keep her going on them and retrofit them to Chitaqua, as well as produce the new ones for the other camps."

The hall was austere, several high cupboards along the two longest walls and a large rug in the centre the only contents. Ellen followed Boze through the doorway to the right, to the living areas, and Dean turned left, walking into a long corridor that led to the kitchen and mess hall, offices, armoury and watch rooms. He stopped in the kitchen, the view across the wall and to the farms beyond, his eyes narrowing slightly as he saw the faded blue pickup in the farmyard of the closest, and the three people unloading the tray.

Liev came into the kitchen, walking over to him and waving his hand at the room expansively. "Well, what do you think?"

Dean glanced over his shoulder around the room. "It's awesome. Think it'll hold five hundred?"

"Easily," Liev said, his gaze following Dean's as the hunter turned back to the window. "Alex and Rufus came in this morning."

"Yeah," Dean said, turning away from the window as Boze and Ellen came into the kitchen.

"Ellen, Alex asked if you could tell Renee that she got the vaccinations," Liev said to her as she stopped beside the big, scrubbed pine table in the centre of the room. "She's leaving some with us, the rest will go to Chitaqua."

"Good," Ellen said abruptly, looking from him to Dean. "Pestilence is the next Horseman, and we have a lot of kids who haven't been vaccinated against the usual childhood diseases. With the close living quarters, it would be too easy for an epidemic to spread here."

Dean nodded. "Better hope we get some doctors from Wichita too."

He turned to look quizzically at Boze. "Rufus going to stay here as well?"

Boze shrugged. "I don't think so. Maurice is moving over, I think Rufus is worried about Bobby."

He was a little worried about Bobby himself, Dean thought. The old man didn't let it show it very often, hardly at all in fact, but it was eating at him, being in the chair, unable to move around, unable to be more than chief researcher. Didn't matter how many times he'd told him that what Bobby did for them was essential, that the rest of them were pretty much just cannon fodder. He caught Ellen's eye and she looked away, lips pursing slightly.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

"Okay," Boze said to Dean as they stood on the porch of the main house, looking over the long convoy of trucks, pickups, cars and wagons that stretched up the drive to the gate. "Got my people, we're all packed up."

"Who're you taking?" Bobby looked up at him, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

"Liev's already there," Boze said. "Tim and his family, Duncan and Alanna, now they're hitched and expecting, Therese and her kids, Rona, Mary, Russell, Clive, Doug, Jocelyn, Danielle, Stu, Carl and Michael. Alex's organised a cut of the supplies, and Dave's already dug out a decent sized truck garden between the fort and the farm."

Bobby nodded. "We'll need some of 'em back for Wichita, so get the civvies training hard to replace them while they're gone."

"Sure," Boze said, grinning down at him. "Got a ground floor room'd suit you, Bobby, if you're sick of seeing Dean's ugly mug every day?"

Bobby smiled dourly up at him. "I'll keep it in mind."

He shivered as he looked back at the vehicles, glancing back at the men standing there. "C'mon, we can finish this pow-wow in my office, where there's a damned fire."

Following the wheelchair, Dean wondered what was eating the old man. His temper seemed to be getting shorter. It could've been any one of a hundred things, he thought, a little bitterly, given what was happening, what they were planning to do, the responsibilities that lay on them. He didn't think it was the situation, though.

"Chuck said he'd give us a copy of that database he's been compiling," Boze said as they walked down the hall and into the office. "Haven't seen too many computers lyin' around in good shape, is that something we should be thinking of looking for?"

Dean stopped by the desk, leaning on one corner as Bobby continued to the hearth, turning the chair around in front of it.

"It wouldn't hurt," Bobby said, his face relaxing slightly under the shadow of his cap. "We got the gennies for power and we're not going to run out of fuel for a long time."

There were five major gas depots in the state, all of them with full storage capacity.

"Add it to Ellen's list," Dean suggested, and Boze nodded, mentally filing it away.

Rufus walked into the office as Boze walked out, and looked from Dean to Bobby, one brow raised. "Anything I need to know?"

"Boze is moving his people today," Dean said, dropping onto the sofa under the window and tipping his head back. "We'll have the hunters back for the attack, but in the meantime they'll be at Tawas."

"Terry said that they're ready to start framing at Camp Sable," Rufus remarked, crossing to the desk and sitting down in the chair in front of it.

"That was quick," Bobby said, wheeling himself around the desk. Reaching down to the drawer, he pulled out three glasses and poured and passed one to Rufus, doing the same for himself, and leaving the third on the edge of the desk for Dean. "Thought that'd take another month?"

"Everyone's working fit to bust, a lot of people are excited at the prospect of the population increase," Rufus said, tipping up the glass and swallowing a mouthful. He looked at Dean. "When do we go to Wichita?"

"One week," Dean told him as he reached across the arm of the sofa and snagged his glass. "We'll leave on Friday, everyone in four cars and the truck for the ordnance."

"Good, making me antsy havin' that hangin' over us," Rufus said, leaning back in the chair.

"How was Grand Rapids?" Dean asked casually.

"Empty, quiet," Rufus said. "Got everything Dave wanted and the vaccinations and extra antibiotics for Tawas as well."

"Whose idea was it to change the specs of the trip?" Dean looked at him, his face expressionless.

"Alex's," Rufus said, looking at him blandly, hiding his half-amused irritation at the edge in the younger man's voice. "We needed the extra drugs."

"That building could've been a trap," Dean said, ignoring the explanation. "You should've had another hunter with you to go in there."

Rufus tilted his head a little as he looked at him thoughtfully. "You went in with two."

"I hadn't eyeballed the place then," Dean countered. "And I wouldn't've if I'd known the layout."

"We were fine," Rufus said, shrugging. "The town's still empty."

For a moment he thought that Dean was going to argue with him about it, watched the conflicting emotions chase each other across the hunter's face, then he seemed to give up, looking down into his glass instead.

"Bin talkin' to Jerome," Bobby broke through the short, tense silence diplomatically. "He said that the order has a library, a secret one, stashed full of stuff we could use."

Dean looked over at him, one brow lifted. "Where?"

"Wouldn't say where, not yet," Bobby said. "He said it can't be found, not without a key, which he doesn't have. But he said he knows where the key is."

Dean glanced at Rufus, who rolled his eyes. "And again, that would be … where?"

"In Wichita," Bobby said dryly, swallowing a mouthful of whiskey. "Safe deposit box 4113, in the Bank of Kansas on Lawrence Street."

Both of the men facing him shifted in their seats. "So we got something else to do while we're rescuing these people?" Dean asked him incredulously. "On top of coordinating diversions, knocking out power substations, destroying demon strongholds, grabbing a thousand people and running?"

"Looks like," Bobby agreed.

"Awesome."

"Nothin's easy."

Dean shot him a dark look, and rubbed a hand over his eyes. "Alright, we haven't got any extra people to handle this – so someone's going to have to double-up."

"You got Jo and Ty providing exits for Franklin and Mel," Rufus said slowly. "They could leave that to Maurice, skirt the south end of the city and keep out of the way of everything else, slip in, hopefully unnoticed?"

Dean looked at Bobby. "How important is this library likely to be? I don't want to risk people if it's all flash and no gold."

"Well, the man does like to make a big thing about the order," Bobby allowed, pushing his cap back slightly as he looked at him. "But … I'd say this could be the difference between having nothing to figure out a way of dealing with Lucifer, and, mebbe, having something. They've been collecting information from every culture, every age since about nine hundred A.D. And he said there're weapons in there; spells, lots of stuff we wouldn't be able to get hold of now, even if we could move around freely."

"Okay." Dean chewed on the corner of his lip as he ran through the timing and locations he, Bobby, Rufus and Franklin had worked out for the attack again. "I'll talk to Jo and Ty about adding to their duties," he said, looking up. "Nobody tells Ellen about this."

"Absolutely not," Rufus agreed with a smile.

"No, no need to worry her unnecessarily," Bobby said, finishing the whiskey in his glass.

* * *

"Hey," Lisa said, walking out onto the porch and sitting down next to Dean on the settle against the wall. She handed him a beer and smoothed her top down over the barely visible bump.

"Hey. Thanks," he said, looking at her. "Everything alright?"

"Yep, gardens are already producing; we'll have fresh greens tonight with dinner."

She glanced at him and looked across the railing to the lake. "Thought we might think about names."

"Names?"

"For the baby," she clarified, half-smiling at him. "Have you got any you like?"

He looked away. He hadn't even thought of that. Or any of it, really.

"Uh …"

"I was thinking of Mary, if it's a girl," she said. "And I like Andrew for a boy, Andy for short."

Dean frowned, his nose wrinkling up. "Andy's the scrawny kid who gets beaten up for his lunch money at school."

"Open to suggestions?"

"Give me some time," he hedged. "I'll think of something before we go."

"Sure. Got another four months to decide." She glanced at the drive, watching a white pickup crawling down it. "Who's that?"

He looked over, his attention sharpening slightly as he recalled seeing the truck over at Camp Tawas. "Dave Patterson, I think. Boze's resident farmer."

"Oh, right, yeah," Lisa said, leaning against him as she watched the truck pull up in front of the church. "The one with the crush on Alex."

Dean looked at her in surprise. "He has a crush on Alex?"

"Renee and Michelle said he does." She shrugged. "I haven't seen them together, so I wouldn't know."

Alex came out of the church and walked down the path toward the truck, her smile easily visible.

"She looks happy to see him," Lisa remarked. Dean nodded, glancing back into the house.

"You seen Jo around today?" he asked her. "I was looking for her earlier."

"Yeah, she's in the back room with Ellen and Chuck," she said. "Why?"

"I need to check with her and Ty about Wichita," he said. "You mind letting her know I want to see her in a few minutes?"

"No, sure," she agreed, getting up. "I'll let her know."

"Thanks," he said, lifting the bottle. "And thanks for the beer."

She smiled as she left and he got to his feet, walking over to the porch railing and leaning against it, watching the scene in front of him as he absently lifted the bottle to his lips and swallowed a mouthful.

_Yep, working up the nerve to ask something_, he thought, watching Dave take off his cap and smooth a hand over his thick, blond hair as Alex walked up to him. _Okay, playing it cool, asking general questions … throw in a joke to lighten the mood …and there it was_.

He saw Dave's hands clench slightly around the cap he held in them, his head tilt to one side as he looked down at the woman in front of him. He saw Alex smile as she ducked her head, the smile still lingering as she looked up at him again, the gentle head shake and the half-step backward. _Crash and burn. Purple Heart for you, Dave_.

Alex reached out, touching his hand with her fingers lightly, her face serious, her eyes shadowed. _Not the right time or place_, Dean thought, looking at her expression. _Not you, it's me_. Dean watched Dave nod understandingly, one shoulder lifting in a small shrug. _Maybe some other time? Some other place? Some other universe where everything was different_, the thought a little bleak, watching Dave stand there, staring after her when Alex turned away and walked back up to the church. After a moment, the farmer got back into his truck and started the engine, swinging the wheel around and turning in the width of the drive, heading back up to the gate.

_And another one bites the dust_. He could understand her not wanting to be involved with Michael, the young hunter could be a douche. She'd turned down Ty and Hank and Stu, at various times that he'd happened to witness, possibly a few more that he hadn't been around to see. But Dave seemed like a straight shooter, he wasn't bad looking, had skills that were important, had made her laugh, picked her flowers. Of course, he considered, it wasn't all that long since Jake. Maybe that was it.

Pushing himself off the rail, he finished the beer, turning to go into the house as Jo came out, looking around for him.

"You wanted to talk about Wichita?" she asked. He gestured to the steps.

"Someplace your mom isn't going to hear," he said, starting down them. "There's another job that we need to do in the town, preferably without anyone noticing what we're doing."

* * *

**_One Week Later_**

They were leaving the camps thin, Dean thought as he idled the black car over the gate track and onto the road, lifting a hand to Risa who stared back at him mulishly from the tower, obviously still disgruntled at being left out. But if they got lucky, nothing would happen and they'd be back in five or six days, or, he corrected himself as he thought of the numbers of civilians they were pulling out, at least the hunters would be.

He sighed as he put his foot down and accelerated on reaching the gravel. When were they ever lucky?

The drive to Kansas would take two days, going the back roads into the state and everyone pulling a shift at the wheel. There were twenty five of them, enough, he hoped, to cover every possible requirement. He and Rufus and Cas would be first in, shutting down the demon barracks while Maggie, Rona, Vincent and Michael secured the buses and got the drivers on and ready. It would work, he thought. The rest of the timing wasn't nearly as critical.

It was already muggy; the summer was turning out to be as hot as the winter had been cold. Opening his window, the car's speed provided a light breeze and Dean wondered if the weather was something that Lucifer was controlling, or just a natural fluctuation. The crops – in the truck gardens they'd planted, in the abandoned gardens of the farms, in the fields around the camps and the ones further away – were all growing well. Food wouldn't be an issue, even with the extra people, for another year at least, Alex had told Ellen.

Provided that they were left alone when it came time to harvest it all, he amended silently to himself. There was that.

He glanced in the mirror, seeing the three other cars following him steadily four car lengths behind, and the army truck behind them. After Wichita, there was Boulder. And then Austin or Vegas. _Best not to get too far ahead of yourself_, he thought sourly, since it was hardly a sure thing that they'd actually succeed and get out of Kansas all in one piece.

His thoughts strayed back to the conversation he'd had with Lisa before he'd gone. He'd been terrified and filled with a restless yearning back when he'd thought Ben might've been his, the contradictory feelings ricocheting through him the entire time he'd spent with them in Cicero in '08.

Now … now he didn't know what the hell he was feeling, the child she was carrying was his, and he couldn't get his head around it, couldn't make it real to himself. She was warm and welcoming, and there wasn't any one thing he felt wasn't right about her … but there wasn't anything he felt that there was either. They didn't have much in common, he'd realised, a while ago. And he was doing a piss-poor job of hiding that feeling from her, of pretending to feel the things that he wasn't.

"What time do you want to hit the building?" Rufus asked, his voice breaking through the uncomfortable thoughts.

Pushing them aside with a sense of relief, Dean shrugged. "About an hour or so before dawn," he said. "Maggie and her crew'll take out the bus drivers at the same time."

"Gonna be tight," Rufus remarked.

Dean glanced at him. "Yeah, well tight's our middle name, right?"

* * *

_**Wichita, Kansas**_

There were two tanks on the roof of the two storey building, one at either end, to provide the gravity-fed sprinkler system with water in case of fire. Dean crouched at the corner of the building, in a cleft of shadow, waiting for the second guard to come around the corner. On the other side of the cut wire mesh fence, Rufus and Cas were waiting in the darkness of a noisome drainage ditch for his signal.

They heard the tick-tock of the guard's shoes before they saw him, the new leather soles on the concrete apron that surrounded the building loud in the night's silence. Dean rose smoothly and stepped out behind him as he passed, one hand whipping around his head and covering his mouth, the other plunging the knife through the ribs into the heart. The wild flashing of the demon light inside the body lasted a few seconds, then he eased the man to the ground and pushed him into the shadow of the wall. Turning around, he whistled softly, then turned back to the ladder bolted to the side of the building and began to climb.

Iron chain and lines of salt would hold the demons inside the building. Every door and window would have to be salted while Dean made his way inside. Rufus passed a bag to Cas and they split up at the corner, each taking a different direction, wrapping the chains they carried through the door handles and padlocking them, spilling the thick lines of salt crystals along thresholds and windows embrasures.

Dean glanced into a second storey window, relieved to see the lights off and no movement inside. The building had been the command centre for the air force base, and the tower controls, equipment and emergency systems were all on the second floor. The lower floor had been given over to barracks for the bulk of the demon-possessed humans who handled the slave camp and had guard duty over the city. He kept climbing to the roof, and walked alongside the low parapet to the first tank, unbolting the cover and easing it aside as he read the blessing prayer that Father Michael had given him, dropping the rosary and cross inside at the conclusion. Crouching in the darkness beside the tank, he waited and watched the open span of roof for five minutes, then began to move silently along the long edge toward the other tank.

They hadn't seen guards on the roof, but it wasn't a surprise when he heard the scrape of a boot over the asphalt surface, dropping and turning as the man's arm swept over his head, the shoulder spring bringing him back to his feet with a flickering motion just to one side and slightly behind the guard. His knife, Ruby's knife, was gripped in one hand and he drove the thick blade into the abdomen just above the pelvis, slicing upwards until the crossguard hit the lower edge of the ribs. He managed to clamp his hand over the demon's mouth as it shook and shuddered on the blade, the backwash of light reflecting on his skin and in his eyes, then he lowered the guard silently and stepped back, wiping the knife on the guard's jacket and looking carefully around the rooftop in case the demon'd had a partner.

The roof was empty and he slipped into the shadows beside the tank, climbing to the domed top and unbolting the cover. The second rosary went in, and Dean crossed himself with a cold smile, finishing the benediction and climbing down. He headed for the stair entrance to take him down into the building.

* * *

Rufus reached the far corner of the building and looked around it, waiting for a minute then slipping around to continue down the wall. He glanced at his watch as he met Cas coming the other way. Five minutes. Dean would be inside now, if he hadn't had any trouble.

He dropped the salt bag and shifted the duffle over his shoulder, leaning close to the angel.

"We'll get started on the planes."

Cas nodded, lifting his own bag higher and following the hunter across the pale concrete field. The planes were lined up, tied down to the ground, out in the open, but easily accessible. The angel reviewed what Franklin had told him once more. Fuel tanks in the wings. One fist-sized lump per wing. One detonator per lump. Timing was fixed at ten minutes, once the primer was pressed. It seemed simple enough. He missed his power, though. Everything took so long the way humans did it.

* * *

Dean opened the fire door carefully, easing it shut behind him and listening to the silence of the big open plan floor. On the western side of the building, the control panels were lit up, power lights flashing steadily in the darkness. He wondered remotely if Lucifer had found any pilots yet. There were too many bases across the country to get rid of all of them. Too many bases of every kind, filled with weapons they couldn't counter. They would just have to hope that the angel would prefer the fire and brimstone approach more than the easy lure of modern technology.

Satisfied he was alone on the floor, he unzipped the bag and pulled out a canister of salt, running a line in front of the doorway, and moving fast along the walls, salting the windowsills and doorways as he came to them. He needed to be uninterrupted for the next bit. The whole wall of the west facing side of the building was practically all windows, and he dropped the empty canisters as he went, pulling out a new one and pouring out the lines until he'd reached the fire door again. Walking quickly across the room, he looked along the banks of computers, panels, monitors and desks that lined the west wall for what he needed. It would be there, somewhere, he thought, frustration rising as he walked past the endless arrays of equipment. It had to be. Every base – hell, every airport had an intercom system.

It was there, down near the north west corner. He saw the mike first and let out a long exhale of relief, putting the bag on top of the desk and pulling out the CD they'd recorded, finding the player and slipping it in. He dragged out the thin plastic drop sheet from the bag, unfolding it and throwing it over the entire panel, then grabbed the duffel and pulled his lighter from his jacket pocket as he hit Play. One more thing and he could get out of here.

The flame flickered and then steadied as he climbed onto the desk and held it up to the metal flower near the ceiling. It took a minute to warm the sensors enough, then every sprinkler came on, the fire alarms flashing red over the exit doors at the same time as the angel's voice suddenly filled the building with Latin.

The exorcism ritual was the same one he'd used in Emporia. Castiel's gravelly voice spoke the Latin fluidly. Dean grinned to himself as he jumped off the table and picked up the bag, running to the roof access stairs, remembering Cas' arguments. An exorcism read by an angel might or might not've had more impact than one read by a man, but the bottom line was that it couldn't hurt.

* * *

Rufus froze as the booming voice rang out over the apron, hearing it resound across the open ground above shrieks and screams from the building behind them. He turned around and looked at the roof line, seeing a single blip of a flashlight, lit then doused and smiled dryly. Through the windows of the lower level, he could see flashes and pulses of light, gold and purple and blue and red, as if the room held a trapped storm cloud. He turned back and slapped another hunk of the Semtex onto the metal wing, inserting the pen detonator and clicking the primer then moving fast and low to the next plane.

* * *

On the other side of the airport, Maggie watched the air force base. There were no signs of any of the demons who should've been here to start the buses and drive to the slave camp. It looked like Dean and Rufus and the angel had done their jobs. She nodded to the darkness behind her, lifting her arm and walking across the street to the bus station.

They got in the buses, starting them up and closing the doors, and Vincent pulled out slowly, leading the convoy down the street toward the civilian airport terminals. Rufus' report had said that there were two demons who'd brought the slaves out of the building in the morning, allocating them to the buses. They would need to work fast when they'd pulled up. Maggie had taken the last bus in the line. If she could draw out the trap fast enough, they could take them both when they brought the last group down to her ride.

* * *

Dean dropped to the ground and ran along the side of the administration building, ducking into the first hangar and pulling out the orange cake of plastic explosive as he skidded across the slick concrete floor. The hangar held five planes, and he broke the cake into three, pressing it into the metal columns in between the bays, shoving in the detonators and setting the primers and moving on with barely a pause for each one.

Four hangars in total. In his head, seconds ticked away. The planes in the long line on the apron would go off first. That would be the signal for Franklin, Mel and Boze to start targeting their buildings, to the north and west. By the time the hangars went up, Maggie and the drivers should be on their way out of the city.

He set the detonator of the third explosive and raced out, ducking into the next hangar to repeat the process. In his peripheral vision, he saw the movement of the hunter and angel across the apron, getting close to the end of their line, and he sped up.

* * *

Rufus slapped the malleable substance onto the wing and set the detonator, clicking the primer and ducking to see under the wing. Castiel was running toward him, the empty bag on his shoulder flapping slightly.

"Last one?"

The angel nodded and gestured across the field to the runways of the civilian airport beyond.

"The buses are loading the slaves."

"Good, because the first of these is going to go off any second –"

The plane at the far end of the apron vaporised in a brilliant flash of light, the sound hitting them a fraction of a second later.

"– now," Rufus finished, with a cold grin. He turned and ran for the eastern fence, as the planes along the row went up, one after another, filling the field with light and flame, the air with the sharp scent of burning aviation fuel and the roar of the explosions.

* * *

"What the FUCK!" The demon spun around and stared past the buildings to the base five hundred yards away. Maggie swung the iron poker hard at the back of its head, knocking it sideways into the trap spray-painted on the tar next to the bus. Behind the second demon, Vincent loomed out of the darkness, slamming a fist into the side of its head and knocking it the ground, Michael appearing beside him and both leaning over to pick it up and throw it into the trap with its partner.

"Make sure everyone's okay," Maggie said, stepping into the trap and pulling the ring of keys from the first demon's belt, tossing it back to Michael. "Get them settled and get out, east and north."

Michael nodded and ran down the line of buses, Vincent hesitating as he looked at Maggie. "You alright with this?"

"Boy, I was performing exorcisms before you were an itch in your daddy's pants, get on with you, and get out of here," Maggie snapped at him, pulling a small leather-bound book from her pocket, the pages marked by an ornate silver and ivory rosary.

She turned back to the trap and opened the book. _"Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii ..."_

* * *

Dean had just finished planting the last wad against the base of the column when he heard the noise behind him, instinct sending him sideways and rolling across the floor, the retort of the gun loud against the hard floor and walls of the hangar, the bullet sending chips and shards of concrete outward as it hit.

Outside the hangar the planes began to blow up and Dean saw the demon's head snap around, rolling onto his feet and launching himself at it while its attention was off him, one hand closing around the wrist of the hand holding the gun to swing it wide of his body, the other driving up into the demon's face, the heel hitting the underside of the nose precisely and pushing the bone and cartilage back into the brain.

The demon flew backwards, finger jerking on the trigger and Dean followed it down, his fingers closing around the hilt of his knife and pulling it free of his belt, driving it down into the chest with his weight over it.

He had no idea what alerted him to the second demon, he was rolling over the dead vessel's chest, dragging out the knife as the first bullet hit the face of the man under him, the second tearing through the sleeve of his jacket. Reversing the clumsy, heavy blade, his wrist flicked underhand as the third bullet punched into his side, leaving a stinging pain and then a spreading feeling of cold.

The demon dropped, the hilt of Ruby's knife jutting from the juncture of neck and shoulders, above the points of the collarbones. Dean wiped a hand over his face and rolled onto his knees, pushing his jacket back and looking at the burned hole in his shirt with a grimace.

He lifted the edge of the shirt gingerly, pulling in a deep breath, and let it out as he saw the entrance hole, an inch from his side, the blood flowing sluggishly out. Feeling under his jacket and shirt at the back, he felt the exit, not much larger since it hadn't much time to expand, flinching as his fingers touched the raw flesh. Not too bad, he told himself, reaching out for his bag and getting to his feet, one hand pressed over the wound.

Another three minutes and the hangar would be history. He had to move.

* * *

To the north, the missiles found their targets, buildings collapsing as their foundations were hit. Franklin stood on the hillside, looking through the scope expressionlessly as Maurice reloaded and he chose another target, firing the Stinger and watching as the building exploded satisfactorily.

"Two more minutes," Maurice said in his ear. "Then we're gone."

In two more minutes, half of the area would be nothing but rubble and smoke, Franklin thought distantly, moving the barrel incrementally to take in another block. He was vaguely aware of Boze and Mel, in positions several hundred yards to either side of him, the whoomf and backfire of their weapons rhythmic in his ears. He'd seen the planes go up to the east and the substation near the turnpike had been blown less than a minute ago, pitching most of the city into darkness, Emmett and Max hopefully burning rubber and heading south out of town by now. As diversions went, they'd brought the city to a state of confusion and chaos that he thought would give them at least three or four days of clear travel with little or no pursuit.

"Time, let's go," Maurice said and Franklin nodded, swinging the Stinger from his shoulder and picking up the big canvas duffel at his feet. The cars were a short walk on the western side of the hill. Maurice would be picking up Mel and Boze. Jo and Ty had already left for the city's centre and their add-on mission.

Pulling in a deep breath, the smell of the accelerant like a old, familiar friend, Franklin smiled a little as he followed Maurice down the hill.

* * *

"There it is," Jo murmured, pointing to the street on their right. Ty turned into the narrow cross street, pulling over in front of the dark bank. The substation had serviced this area and every light was out, the buildings dark and silent.

"Won't have to worry about bridging an alarm," he muttered as he stopped the engine and swung out of the car.

"No," Jo said shortly, crossing the sidewalk and crouching in front of the door, her hand digging for the set of lock picks in her pocket. The smash of glass to her left snapped her head around to see Ty grinning at her as he stepped through the broken window.

"Old habits," she acknowledged wryly, following him inside.

They risked the flashlights, the interior stygian, and saw the old-fashioned signs directing customers to various services that the bank had to offer, walking down the wide, carpeted stairs to the safety deposit box room silently, shielding the lights as much as possible with their hands. It wasn't all that likely that any demons would be patrolling this largely unused neighbourhood while so much was going on elsewhere in the city, but there was no point at all to attracting anyone's attention unnecessarily. And luck favoured the prudent.

"What was the number?" Ty asked her, as he walked down the wall of shiny metal doors.

"4113," Jo said, taking the other wall. "Here."

She slowed as she hit the four thousands, running a finger lightly along the numbered boxes. "Got it."

Ty turned and lifted the crow bar, forcing it into the narrow gap between the locked door and the metal rim. A sharp yank and the lock snapped. He moved back and Jo lifted the long, slender box out and set it on the table, pulling out her picks. She gentled them through the lock slowly and was rewarded a minute later by a soft click.

Lifting the lid, she looked inside, Ty leaning over her shoulder.

"That's it?"

"Looks like," Jo said, picking up the small carved box and tucking it into her jacket pocket. "Let's go, this place gives me the creeps."

* * *

_**CR 16, Kansas**_

Maggie slowed down and took the corner gently, glancing into the mirror at the men and women seated packed into the bus behind her. They'd had to squeeze twice as many in as the buses were designed to carry, and it was only due to several of the slaves having bus experience that they'd gotten everyone out.

The bus wasn't showing any lights and the thin moonlight lit their faces to pale and ghastly shades, emphasising the hollows and the scars mercilessly. For the moment, she thought, they were still in shock, the rush of getting out of the city, the explosions behind them, the strangeness of their rescuers were keeping them quiet and dumbed down. By morning, it might be a different story.

Right now, though, they were easy to manage. She'd watched the other buses split off along the way, everyone taking the back routes they knew best, heading east via a dozen different roads. She was heading north into Nebraska and then east above the eighty. There was a caravan park in northern Indiana that she thought would provide enough additional vehicles to ease her load somewhat.

* * *

_**Wichita, Kansas**_

"What the hell happened to you?" Rufus frowned at Dean's awkwardly doubled up gait as he met them at the fence.

"A little ventilation," Dean said, gesturing at the fence. "Let's get out of here."

"Cas," Rufus said, turning around to the angel. "Get him in the back seat and get it patched up."

"I'm not really –"

"Yeah, well, you can't drive, so you'll have to learn to do something useful," Rufus snapped, cutting him off.

"Relax, Cas, I'll tell you what to do," Dean said, ducking under the wire link as the angel held it apart. "Nothing to it."

Sliding into the back seat, he watched Cas take the first aid box from Rufus and set it down between them, lifting his clothes higher above the two holes, glad that the angel didn't need a flashlight to see what he was doing. They'd been lucky with the moonlight, and Rufus peeled away from the sidewalk, heading east through a different neighbourhood than the one they'd come in on, the black car little more than a shadow.

Leaning away from Cas, Dean looked over his shoulder. "Bullet probably dragged a bit of the shirt in with it," he said, ignoring the throbbing that seemed to be getting stronger, shaking through his bones. "There's a bottle in the kit marked saline solution, squirt it through from back to front, until you're pretty sure there's nothing left inside."

The angel found the bottle and irrigated the wound thoroughly, glancing up as Dean's breath hissed through his teeth.

"Is it clean?"

"I can't perceive any further debris inside the wound."

"A simple yes or no is usually enough," Dean said, sweat dripping down his face. "Pass me something to wipe this off."

Cas passed him a cloth and he nodded. "Alright, I'm gonna need a bit of help for the next bit."

He gestured to the duffel sitting on the floor. "Flask in there somewhere."

"For the wound?"

Rufus glanced in the rear view mirror, meeting Dean's eyes and smiling. "No, for your patient. Eighty-proof painkiller, Cas."

"Is this it?" The angel held up the silver flask. Dean nodded and held out his hand for it, taking it and unscrewing the lid with his teeth. He swallowed half the contents in two gulps and looked back at Cas.

"The other bottle in there is pure alcohol, you need to squirt some through, it'll kill anything the saline missed."

"This might sting," Castiel said, reading the label on the squeeze bottle in the dark. He squeezed the clear liquid into the wound and Dean bit down hard against the sudden agonising burning sensation that rippled up and down from the wound, flooding his nervous system and making the throbbing ache seem insignificant.

"Might sting," he muttered dazedly, finishing the contents of the flask as he felt Cas pack the thick gauze dressings to either side, and tape them down firmly. "You need more experience with pain, Cas."

"I'm sure I'll get it," the angel said dryly, shutting the box and setting it on the floor.

* * *

_**CR 8, Missouri**_

Rona let the bus coast gently to a halt under the deep shadows of the copse of trees on the right shoulder, her eyes fixed to the headlights moving up the road ahead of her. Five, no, six cars were travelling along the highway, moving fast.

"Are they looking for us?" A woman asked behind her, her voice rising a little as panic filled her.

"No," the man who answered stood near the driver's seat, looking back, his voice deep and certain. "We're fine."

"No. No," the woman moaned softly. "They'll come and they'll find us, and they'll punish us –"

"Shut up, Marcie," another woman hissed furiously. "Just shut up and we'll be okay."

Rona glanced back. "All of you shut up."

"No! We shouldn't have tried to escape, they're going to come and they'll find –"

There was an odd thump, followed by silence. Rona twisted around in the seat, looking back. Marcie was slumped against the seat.

"Sorry, just didn't think it was the time for hysteria," a small man said, taking off his glasses and wiping them on his handkerchief.

"Hear, hear," the man beside Rona said quietly.

"All right," she said, turning around and standing up. "Do you people know each other – at all?"

"Some of us do," the small man said. "The others …"

"Introduce yourselves, right now," Rona said firmly. "Keep your voices down, but take a good look at each other, and say something about yourselves. We've got two days in this heap, and I want you to feel like you can trust each other, a little anyway."

She turned back to the front and sat down.

"Good advice," the man beside her said, holding out his hand. "Paulo Gutierrez, I was a paramedic in Toledo."

Rona looked at his hand and took it. "Glad to meet you, Paulo. I'm Rona Marsh. I used to teach martial arts." She glanced back. "Could you take a look at that woman and make sure she hasn't got a concussion?"

"No problem."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Hank held two screwdrivers and a half dozen screws in his mouth as his legs locked tighter around the branch and he leaned out a little further.

"How's that?" he said. In the truck below the tree, Therese relayed the question to Bobby.

"Good, I can see about thirty yards clear now," Bobby replied, looking at the black and white monitor on the table to one side of the hall in the main house.

"Thirty yards now," Therese called up to Hank.

He nodded and tightened the bracket, carefully spitting out two screws and catching the second screwdriver as it seemed about to fall.

"That's the last one for this approach," he said to Therese. "Get the truck started and we'll do the Camp Tawas roads."

"We're done here, Bobby, going over to install them at Camp Tawas," Therese said into the mike, sliding into the driver's seat.

"Tell Hank, good job. Where'd he get 'em anyway?"

"He said he saw a whole box in the back room of the Gadgets to Go place in East Tawas," Therese said. "Just grabbed them thinking they'd be good for us."

"Well, tell him he was right, much more comfy watching the damned road this way," Bobby said.

"Affirmative," Therese said, smiling as Hank got in beside her. "Bobby says good work."

Hank grinned. "I put the solar panel up the top, it should get enough charge to keep the battery going until we need to replace it."

"How many more?"

"Twelve, but we'll save some for the approaches to Camp Sable. I thought six for Tawas and six for Sable. They'll be here in a few days."

* * *

_**CR 19, Missouri**_

Rufus pulled off onto the shoulder as Dean shifted uncomfortably in the corner between the door and the back of the seat again.

"What?"

"Get in the back," Rufus said. "Cas, you move up here."

"I'm fine," Dean said, two vertical creases appearing between his brows.

"You're aggravating the wound, you can't rest, and the constant muttering is gettin' on my nerves," Rufus said. "Get in the back and get some sleep."

Dean looked at him for a long moment, then opened the passenger door, muttering under his breath as he got out.

"What? Didn't quite catch that?" Rufus said, watching him walk past Cas on the way to the back.

Cas got in the front and Dean crawled into the back, shutting the back door, still muttering as he stretched out along the seat.

"Yeah, still not getting it," Rufus said, putting the car into gear and pulling out. "Quit griping and sleep."

Dean rolled onto his left side, and closed his eyes.

Cas had watched the exchange with wide eyes. He didn't think he'd ever seen Dean give up that readily, or take being ordered around that easily.

The angel looked over at Rufus. "You two must have quite a history?"

Rufus glanced at him, frowning and shaking his head. "Nah, met him first time 'bout three years ago. He just reminds me of me when I was that age."

The corner of Dean's mouth lifted slightly as he hunched down a bit further. He wasn't going to admit that stretched out took a lot of the pain out of his wound.

* * *

_**US-23, Michigan**_

"Not far now, folks," Vincent said, looking in the big rear view mirror of the bus. "Another couple of hours and there'll be food and beds and hot showers and you can relax."

There was a ragged cheer from the people on the bus. The last two days had been an unending nightmare of trying to share the water and food supplies that were scrounged from the towns they'd passed near, from farms and houses that seemed empty and deserted, crowded together, free but still afraid.

The sky was paling to the east, and Vincent put his foot down a little harder, the road familiar, the lake to their right fish-scaled in pink and silver as the dawn light strengthened.

* * *

_**CR 14, Ann Arbor, Michigan**_

Evelyn stared at the lights in her mirrors, her heart thudding against her chest as they kept get brighter.

She put her foot down and looked at the road ahead, trying to remember if there were any places she could turn off, anywhere she could hide. Fragments of advice from Maggie drifted in and out of her thoughts … but she couldn't hold onto them, couldn't remember the details.

The cars behind accelerated and she bit back a scream as they shot up to either side of the bus, the people in the bus staring down at them, silent and terrified as the bus' engine lifted to a higher note.

"Ev, watch out!"

She jerked her gaze from the mirrors to the windshield, seeing the dog-leg left ahead, rusted and weathered barricades fallen to one side where the concrete road hadn't been finished, nothing beyond the drop off at the end. Hauling at the wheel, her foot pressed down on the accelerator instead of the brake and the bus lifted onto two wheels as the torque wrenched at the long axis.

Screams filled her ears. The screams of the people she'd been carrying to safety and the higher pitched screams of metal on metal as the bus caught the cars beside her, crushing them beneath it. The turn caught the outer cars as well, the first shooting off the edge and falling to the road below, the fuel tank ignited by the sudden compression and the trail of sparks as it hit the construction machines. The bus fell onto its side and flew off the uncompleted end of the freeway after it, dragging the cars along underneath.

A moment of clarity and darkness, the noise receded away from her as she gripped the wheel and stared through the expanse of glass in front of her. Then they hit the rusted, yellow bulldozer, brilliant for a moment in the bus' headlights and the world disappeared in sound and fury and flame.

* * *

_**Atlanta, Georgia**_

Lucifer stepped through the French doors onto the paved stone terrace, leaving the charred and smoking heaps of ash behind him and crossing the dewy lawn.

"What exactly am I going to do about your brother, Sammy?" he asked softly.

The alligator shoes and the silk cuffs of the trousers were soaked by the time he'd reached the vine-engulfed gazebo, but the fallen angel was unaware of the moisture.

"I can't see him, can't see their little nest," he continued, his voice getting harder, sharper, hands closing into fists. Two Horsemen dead or so close to it they may as well as been, useless in any case. Wichita would take months to get back to running functionally again. He didn't know where Pestilence was, the Horseman off on his demented crusade of vengeance against the one man who was derailing everything, hiding himself thoroughly from the angel holding his bonds.

Dean would come for his brother, that he knew. From Sam's memories, and from the little he'd seen of his brother, that was a guarantee. How much damage would he do in the meantime?

Thunder rumbled above the white city, a manifestation of the frustrated fury that coiled and uncoiled inside of him. The greatest of all angels, the most powerful and he couldn't kill one man. And in a place he hadn't acknowledged, hadn't been able to look at, a thin thread of fear was growing. They'd always assumed that the prophecy referred to the Second War, to a battle with Michael and the defeat of Heaven, casting down the pillars and burning the whole thing down, laying waste to the creation of their Father. But it could read another way, he knew.

_No, Sammy_, he thought coldly, feeling the hot, distant squirm of hope from within the prison of his vessel's soul. _Do not hope. Do not dare to hope that he will somehow succeed. It is not possible_.

Michael was moving again. He'd felt the raising, felt his brother on this plane, taking the only other vessel that was available. The sixth seal would be opened soon and she would roam, her creations multiplying and spreading, her temptations sending ever more souls down to the pit, their souls empowering him. He drew in a deep breath, calming himself, forcing his fingers to uncurl.

In the meantime, he still had the most powerful of the Four bound and obedient. The pale rider could wreak a little havoc on his behalf.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The garden was a jungle of a million shades of green, every possible leaf shape and texture, the broad, elephant-ear leaves of the pumpkins; tall, dark, wrinkled silverbeet; the more relaxed and brighter green spinach; cascading tomatoes and peas covering the trellises, sharp spears of the clumps of onions and garlic bulbs, the darker hedges of basil, intermingled with the small, heart-shaped leaves of the ground-creeping oregano; rosemary, sage, feathery-topped carrots … Alex picked her way through the beds, the big basket over her arm and four chattering children trailing her, as she pointed out what to pick and why.

She'd spent the last two days at Camp Tawas, going through their supplies as the new people had settled in, helping with the long and tedious process of going through their skills and sorting out schedules for training, for work crews, for the next big supply run.

In total, the hunters had rescued eight hundred and sixty-eight people from Wichita. One of the buses hadn't shown up and the reluctant conclusion had been that they hadn't made it. There was no way to be sure of that, no way to find out what had happened, but a memorial service had been held anyway, down by the lake shore.

Most of them were now quartered at Tawas, in crowded conditions, but all seemed to be relieved to be free. She wondered at how long that relief would last. If they could get the camp finished and Sable as well, it would ease the situation; give the people a sense of having a life, rather than just a short term sanctuary. There were a lot more people whose skills were useful now, including two doctors and three nurses, two of whom had more than sixty years experience between them, the third who'd been a theatre nurse in a large hospital. She'd felt her own relief at finding them, putting the medicinal stores into their hands gratefully and talking to all of them about what else might be needed.

With the one of the doctors and a nurse moving into Chitaqua, Renee had taken Alice and Cody and gone to Tawas, moving in with Boze. The relationship had been conducted with the utmost discretion and everyone but she and Ellen had been surprised. The corners of her mouth tucked in slightly as she remembered Maurice's shocked expression.

"Thought you'd be down at the barn," the deep voice was behind her, and she turned around, seeing Dean standing a few feet away, a faint wince crossing his features as he leaned against the trellis post.

"You should be giving that a chance to heal up," she said, looking pointedly at his side. "Ben and Faith are looking after the animals mostly now."

He nodded. "Ben told me."

He looked around at the rioting beds, one brow lifted. "Looks healthy."

"It is," she said, shifting the rapidly filling basket on her arm, the children gathering vegetables and depositing them as she waited for him to come to the point.

He watched her shift her weight and looked down. "Hard to catch up with you, thought you might be avoiding me."

Alex sighed inwardly. She had been, but there was nothing to be gained from telling him that. The old easiness between them had been broken with Jake's attack. And the little that had remained had dissipated when Lisa had told everyone. She'd known that his partner hadn't been comfortable with her, Lisa hadn't concealed her irritability with the time Dean had spent talking to her. She didn't see the point in trying to hold onto something that hadn't been much to begin with.

"No, just a lot to do with the new people," she said lightly, turning to nod as Prudence and Maddie came up with big bunches of dirt-encrusted onions, adjusting the basket's balance as they dropped them in. "Was there something you wanted to talk about?"

Dean gestured vaguely, his gaze dropping uncomfortably. "No, not really. Just wanted your take on the new people and how they're settling in."

"They seem to be doing alright," Alex said, taking the comment at face value. "Terry seems confident that Sable will be ready to move into in a few weeks, and that'll help with the crowding." She looked around for the children, catching sight of them through the greenery. "Merrin's taken over the medical supplies and Bernice is happy to move to Sable once Emmett and Max have got the main building habitable. At least we don't have to worry so much about injuries and sickness now."

He nodded. "Have you talked to Dave about the farm situation?"

"Yesterday," she confirmed, shifting her grip on the basket again. "They'll start harvesting the wheat in two weeks, then the rest as it matures. We'll need nearly everyone to handle the fruit as it comes ripe, but Sable should be almost finished by then."

"Are you okay?" he asked abruptly, not knowing how to bring the conversation around to the things he wanted to know more circumspectly.

Alex looked at him. For a very brief moment, she was tempted to be completely honest, to get past this habit they'd fallen into of half-truth and evasions, of talking around things. She caught herself before she did, instinctively knowing that it would only make him more uncomfortable.

"Yeah, I've got plenty to do."

_Not much of an answer_, he thought, looking at her. "That's not … I spoke to Father Michael," he said, hoping that would make it plainer.

"Oh," Alex said, nodding. "You want to know if I'm still a flight risk?"

Dean looked away, mouth twisting up at the bluntness of the answer. The damned conversation had turned into a minefield and he wasn't sure how that had happened or why.

"No," she said. "I'm not."

"Good." He exhaled audibly. There was a second as the word and its implications hung in the air between them, then his belated realisation of how it had sounded kicked in, and he opened his mouth to add something less incendiary but she beat him to it.

"Yeah, you can cross off that your list of concerns," she said, the derisive smile not concealing the edge in her voice.

"That's not what –"

"It's fine," she cut him off, shrugging and turning away. "Kids, we've got enough!"

He stepped aside as she walked past him, the full basket balanced against one hip, the four children trooping out behind her. _Good job_, he thought, walking slowly out of the garden after them.

* * *

_**Toledo, Ohio**_

Jake stood at the street corner, swaying slightly as the world sparkled and throbbed around him, bulging in and out with the staggered rhythm of his heart beat. He was in bad shape, he thought vaguely, looking down at the blistering pustules that covered his visible skin, feeling the press of his glands against his windpipe. His head had been pounding for four days, he thought he had a fever but he couldn't be sure because the sunlight had been so bright it had cut through his eyes, leaving him almost blind, and he couldn't differentiate between the heat in his hands and the heat he could feel in his face, his neck … everywhere. He turned his head a little as bile rose up his throat, weakly ejecting it onto the sidewalk, wiping at the dribbles that dripped off his chin with one filthy hand.

_Bad shape_. The thought floated against the fuzzy grey cloud that filled his mind. The cuts and slashes that the demon had inflicted were bright red, swollen and angry-looking. Infected-looking. His clothes were stiff with blood and the fluids that leaked from the pustules every time he moved and they broke open, the smell stomach-turning and making him wonder if this was a dream because he couldn't be on his feet if it was all real, all happening. He'd have fallen long ago.

A vague memory rose up behind his eyes, stumbling through a wood, the growls and snarls of a pack of dogs filling his ears. He'd stopped, leaning against a tree and had waited for them to attack. The direction of the wind had turned and they'd gone, just like that, disappearing into the dark. He'd wondered if the smell had driven them off.

The noise beside him was unexpected and he opened his eyes, turning his head stiffly against the pain to look at the man standing on the sidewalk nearby. _Croatie_, he thought, the knowledge raising no interest whatsoever. He was supposed to meet them, a distant, distant thought reminded him. Supposed to meet them here. In this city. On this corner.

More and more crept along the street, out from the shadows of the buildings, and the rusting hulks of the overturned and smashed cars that littered the street, until he was surrounded by them, unable to see past them. _A lot of croaties_.

The leader might have been a tall man once. He was a little bent now, his greyish skin sagging over the big frame. Matted, blond hair fell down his back and over his brow, shadowing the deep-set, glittering dark eyes. Jake watched blankly as the lips drew back from pointed, snaggled teeth, black and bleeding in the gums. He saw the man lift his hand and drop it abruptly.

The crowd surged forward, falling on the man, knocking him to the ground. Jake disappeared under the mass of grunting, snarling grey bodies, unable to scream, dying quickly and painfully as they ripped the meat from his body, devouring it and fighting each other for more.

On the wire above the street, a crow sat and looked down as the croaties slowly moved away. There was nothing to be seen of the man who'd been standing there, on the corner, just a few bones, picked clean and cracked open. The crow chirruped to itself and spread its wings, gaining altitude over the city. Beneath, along the cluttered and burned out streets, the mass of creatures moved northwards, heading for the shores of the lake, driven by a compulsion to keep going north, along the water.


	11. Chapter 11 On the Edge of the Abyss

**Chapter 11 On the Edge of the Abyss**

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, southern Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Stu rubbed his eyes tiredly as he shifted on the high tower platform between the fields and the wide strip of forest that divided the farmland from the lake. The sky was lightening, turning the night mists that rose from the lake and the damp ground from a murky grey to a shifting, nacreous silver, the trunks of the trees barely visible and the fields hidden completely.

The outer watch, as the towers were called, were a rostered duty for everyone over sixteen years old, and the job usually came around once every four months. Four outer watch towers looked out over the approach roads to each of the camps, and each watcher had a radio to alert the night watch in the camps if anything was seen or heard.

He'd relieved Marie at midnight, the thin, dark-haired woman grumbling as she'd climbed down and headed back to Tawas. Cheryl would be here any time now to take over the first of the day watches and he wondered vaguely if he'd be able to convince her to spend another night with him in the deep hay piles in the barn. He had the feeling it'd been a one-off event for her. There was no harm in asking, he thought tiredly and yawned again, looking around the mist-enshrouded land.

The movement caught his eye. For a moment, he wondered if his brain had created it, that furtive ducking in the darkness under the canopies of the trees, a combination of tiredness and the shifting, amorphous mist. Getting to his knees, he picked up the binoculars beside him, lifting them up and adjusting the focus on the line of trees to the east as the fog swirled and shifted across the ground in between.

There. And there. No figment of his imagination. Real.

His heart began to pound as he picked out more and more shadows in the gloom between the trees. He heard the distinctive jingle of Cheryl's keys at the same time, his head snapping around to see her bright blonde hair catch the light as the sun peeped above the horizon.

"Cheryl, look out!"

She stopped, staring around her, a slim woman in her early twenties, curves coming back with regular food, filling out the t-shirt and jeans she wore. She saw the shapes under the trees at the same time as Stu dropped the glasses and picked up his rifle, screaming at her as he lifted the barrel and brought the sight down over the first to break out from the shadows.

"RUN!"

Cheryl turned and ran. Stu pulled the trigger, watching the croaty's head explode like an overripe melon as the big calibre hit the side, grunting in satisfaction as he worked the bolt and found the next target. But they were pouring out of the tree line now, not ten or twenty but a hundred or more, flanking Cheryl as she ran up the long rise toward the camp, others breaking off and heading for him. He heard her scream as he fired again, unable to spare the time to look for her, knowing what it meant anyway, his heart contracting sharply in his chest.

An arm slapped against the bottom of the platform, pushing at the trap door. Stu checked the bolts and gagged as the sickly-sweetish scent was blown up and over him by the vagrant morning breeze, caught from the group of creatures below him. Staring down at them, firing randomly now into the crowd, he could see there was something wrong with them, other than the usual croaty afflictions. Their skin seemed bumpy, as if they were covered in warts. And in their half-naked state, he could clearly see the swellings under their arms and jaws, in the joins between pelvis and thigh, the skin there shiny and black.

* * *

Boze stared at the monitor, shutting out the alarm system that was blaring through the compound around him. The small black and white picture showed the heaving mass of croaties, fighting each other over something on the ground. He didn't want to know what the something was.

"How many?" he snapped at Rona, night watch on duty.

"More than a hundred, but they're splitting up, keeping to the forest along the lake so we can't get a fix on the exact number," she answered, licking her lips and keeping her eyes carefully averted from the screen.

"You called in to Chitaqua and Sable?"

"Of course, as soon as I heard the shot," she said.

"Sorry," he said, rubbing a hand over his face. "Keep an eye on what you can see from here."

He turned away, looking up at the stairs as Renee came down, dressed and with her arms full of blankets.

"Ray's setting up a triage in the dining room," she said to him, turning to walk with him down the hall. "Any wounded, bring them straight in to us."

He nodded, watching her peel away as he continued on. He'd fallen hard from the minute he'd met her, but it'd taken him almost a year to get her alone for long enough to tell her how he'd felt. He'd been shocked when she'd smiled shyly and told him that she'd felt the same way. She was a practical, pragmatic woman, at least in public. In private, there was a different side to her.

Going out onto the wide porch he stopped for a moment, looking at the people lining the wall, listening to the steady chatter of machine guns, and the occasional blasts of the mines that were set up in concentric rings around the camp. No matter how many there were, they could defend themselves in here, he thought firmly.

* * *

_**Camp Sable, northern Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Emmett looked down at the grey shapes that ran for the walls, throwing themselves against the logs and falling back, trampled under the next wave. Occasionally, one wouldn't get back up and several others would fall on it, the noises rising from the group bringing bile to his throat, nothing left of the croaty when the group broke apart but a few white bones.

_Well, if you were wondering if they were still cannibalistic, now you know_, he thought grimly, turning away. There was no chance of them being able to get in, the walls were twenty feet above the sloping ground, topped by the razor wire, and his people were firing continuously, leaving most of the attackers on the blood-soaked grass of the open ground between camp, forest and lake riddled with bullet holes.

"Nothing supernatural about them, at least," Max said at his elbow, her face cool and empty of emotion as she watched the carnage.

"No, I'm thankful for small blessings," he agreed. "Any of ours hurt?"

"Jerry dropped a box of ammunition on his foot," she told him with a disdainful sniff. "Joel's treating him."

Emmett smiled and nodded. The single gate to the compound had been built in the same way as the Tawas gate. It was impenetrable but the croaties had concentrated their attack there, a growing heap of bodies lying outside of it now.

"You got word from Boze or Dean?"

"Boze says they're doing the same thing to Tawas as they are here, just circling the walls and throwing themselves into the kill zone," Max said, her brows drawing together at the thought. "Dean was at the gate. Bobby said that they took out a helluva lot with the mines, setting them off as they watched them come in through the zones, but they're still coming."

"Suicidal?"

"Seems that way," she agreed reluctantly. "I don't like the way they look now."

"They never were all that pretty," Emmett looked down at the bodies at the base of the slope.

"They look different … lumpy," Max said uneasily. "And those swellings, what are they from?"

Emmett shook his head. "Dunno, when they're all dead, we can go out and take a look."

"I'm not sure that's a good idea."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Jerome leaned forward, staring at the small black and pictures, a deep frown shadowing his eyes.

"Bobby, you ever see smallpox when it was still around?" he asked the hunter in a low voice.

"Saw it out west a couple of times, before the vaccinations became compulsory," Bobby said slowly. "Why?"

"Look at these things," Jerome said, pointing at the screens. "It's hard to tell with such a small image, but I'd swear those are pox blisters."

Bobby swallowed. "I'll get the doc."

He turned the wheelchair fast, heading for the back room behind the kitchen where Kim and Merrin had set up an emergency room.

"Doc, need you to see something," he said, stopping at the doorway. She looked up at him, and nodded to Merrin, leaving the nurse to continue setting out the equipment and lay out sterilised cloths over the table.

"What is it?" Kim hurried down the hall behind him.

"Smallpox, we think," Bobby said shortly, pushing the chair to the monitors as fast as he could.

The small dark-haired woman passed him, moving around to Jerome's side and leaning toward the monitors. "This isn't distinctive enough to be sure, it could –"

She froze as a body fell across the camera's field of view, much closer than the others, her eyes widening and her breath catching as she saw the pustules over the body. Her attention sharpened when she noticed the blackened, swollen flesh under the armpit.

"Oh god, no."

"It's bubonic plague, isn't it?" Jerome said quietly beside her.

Looking at him, she nodded. "I think so. It may have become pneumonic by now, there's no way to be certain."

"Plague?!" Bobby snapped. "They've got plague?"

"The lymph nodes are all swollen, blackened. A little gift from Pestilence, I would imagine," Jerome continued expressionlessly. He looked at Bobby.

"You have to tell Dean, all of them, to burn those bodies now, flaming arrows if they have to, but they are not to go near them, they have to be burned straight away."

Bobby looked at Kim, and she nodded. "I don't know if Alex got tetracycline, I'll check but it only works if there's no infection, it will protect us if no one's become –"

She stopped talking, turning on her heel and running for the basement.

"Jesus wept," Bobby said tiredly, turning to the radio.

* * *

Dean looked down at the pile of bodies that were heaped in front of the gate. The croaties were just throwing themselves into the cross-fire. He wondered briefly if the idea was to make a big enough heap so that some of them could climb over, but that didn't seem to be the plan. There didn't seem to be a plan.

The radio crackled beside him, and he picked it up. "Yeah?"

"Dean, they're infected with smallpox and plague, you have to burn them. Burn all of them," Bobby's voice came out of the speaker loud and clear. Dean stared at the attacking croaties in disbelief.

"Smallpox and … plague?" he repeated.

"BURN THEM GODDAMMIT!" Bobby yelled into the mike, his fear palpable over the airwaves. "NOW!"

"Right." He put the radio down and looked at the people standing back from the gate. "Michael, Tom, get a truck, get the flamethrowers, get the crossbows and quarrels and a couple of cans of gas," he snapped.

The two men turned and raced down the drive, everyone else drawing back further from the fence and the bodies of the croaties that were scattered along its length.

He looked at the fence. How contagious was the fucking plague? How did it infect? So far as he'd seen, no one had gone near the croaties, alive or dead, but if it spread through the air … he shut the thought down. He needed a shitload more information to protect everyone.

* * *

Kim looked at Alex as she passed the doctor the boxes. "I only got a couple of hundred doses, I didn't think it was a high danger."

"How many people are vaccinated against smallpox here?" Kim asked, taking the boxes.

"Not many, not any more," Alex said, frowning. "I got a vaccination to go to South America, when I was eighteen." She lifted the sleeve of her shirt, dragging it up to the shoulder to show the small, round puckered scar there. "But most people, it hasn't been endemic to the US for over sixty years."

Kim nodded. "We'll start with the vaccinations, absolutely everyone. If we can burn every body, and give the tetracycline to anyone who might have been exposed, I think we've got a good chance of avoiding infection."

"Every camp can be quarantined effectively, until the incubation period is finished," Alex added, lifting the boxes of vaccine down onto the cart.

"Is there any chance that the … uh … horseman, Pestilence, could've changed the parameters of the disease?" Kim asked awkwardly. The two old men had sprung that on her and she still wasn't sure if she believed it, although the croaties presence alone was a compelling argument in their favour.

"I don't know much about the Horsemen, Kim," Alex said, counting through the boxes she'd loaded. "Jerome and Bobby really are the experts. It's possible, I guess."

"We'll have to run the bloodwork if anyone does become infected, to be sure," Kim said, half to herself. "Do we have that equipment here?"

"Some, Renee set up a simple lab," Alex said, pointing down the hall of the basement. "She wanted to be able to do a few things."

"Good, that's a start," she said, looking at the boxes. "We'll both have a shot of the tetracycline. We're both vaccinated against smallpox so we'll have to take the vaccinations and the doses to the other camps." She looked around the crowded store room. "Gloves, masks, do we have clean suits?"

"Not to CDC standard," Alex said shortly, gesturing to one side of the room. "Just normal infectious ward suits."

"They'll be alright provided the infection hasn't spread to anyone's lungs."

"We won't be able to tell that," Alex said, looking at her.

"No." Kim nodded, picking up a box of the thin suits. "We'll have to hope."

* * *

Rufus looked down at the two women, shaking his head. "Give me a shot, goddammit, I've had the pox vaccination, you're not going anywhere on your own."

Alex tuned out the argument, looking out over the porch railing. Everywhere she looked, the sky was filled with curling columns of black smoke, and she was grateful that the small breeze was coming from the lake, taking the smoke and scents that rose with it north into the forest. All three camps were burning the bodies that had fallen outside of them, and the remaining croaties still attacking were being hit by pitch-soaked quarrels, or molotovs, glass bottles filled with gas and stuffed with a cloth rag to act as a wick, lit and thrown at them from the perimeter walls. They would be lucky to see out the attack without setting off a forest fire, she thought uneasily.

"Alright, let's go," Rufus said, rubbing his arm furiously where Dr Sui had given him the shot. Alex followed him down the porch steps to the truck.

* * *

_**Eight hours later**_

Boze stared out through the window. The sunset had lit the mirror-smooth surface of the lake in a fiery shade of red, darker than usual as the near-horizontal light passed through the smoke that still clung to the camps and forests. It gave the unsettling impression that the lake was on fire. He turned around and looked at Dean, Emmett and Bobby, shaking his head.

"Well, the good news is that we've run four sweeps from Tawas to the other side of Lake Solitude, and we seem to have gotten them all," he said, wiping a grimy over an equally grimy face. They all looked the same, the soot and smell of the fires over their skin, their clothing.

"And the bad news?" Bobby asked unwillingly.

"A few changes to the croaties. Firstly, we threw holy water over them – zero effect. Whatever the demon component of the virus was, it's gone now. They don't react to holy water, salt or iron so all our protection is worthless against them getting into the compounds or houses if they can find a way into the camps. Secondly, Stu Redman was on outer watch. He got caught on the tower to the south of the compound. He took a lot of them out but they got him before we could get anyone out there. He was dead, clinically, physically, dead as a doornail, but he got up when we got there and started coming after us."

"So we got real zombie action now?" Rufus asked, with a snort. "We can't exactly nail 'em to their grave beds."

"Headshots work, but it takes a few," Boze said. "Gotta make sure there's nothing left of the noggin." He drew in a deep breath. "Also, looks like the croaties don't need blood to blood transfer anymore," he added, leaning against Bobby's desk. "Mark Farrell got bit by one on the sweep. Took fifteen minutes for him to turn."

Kim Sui looked at him carefully. "You killed him? That wouldn't show us if the bite could also transfer the smallpox or the plague via body fluids, the incubation periods for both is much longer."

Jerome frowned. "Plague usually transfers that way, doesn't it?"

"It can, unless the lungs are infected. In which case a cough can be enough to transmit the pneumonic variation. And the incubation for that is much faster, twenty-four hours."

"Awesome," Dean said, looking from her to Bobby. "And the hits just keep on coming."

"They're all dead, Dean," Bobby said dryly, turning to look at Kim. "So long as we burn the bodies, wipe everything down, make sure no one touches nuthin', keep anyone suspected of exposure quarantined for the next couple of weeks, we're all right, aren't we?"

Kim nodded slowly. "Generally, yes. If there are no other variables we need to worry about."

"We found a dozen of the bodies in the lake," Emmett said, looking at her. "We got 'em out and burned them, but Tawas and Sable pull their drinking water from Lake Tawas – are we going to get infected from it?"

"I'll get samples, and check them," she said briskly. "In the meantime is there another water source that you can use for drinking? No washing, no laundry, until I've checked?"

"Yeah, both camps have wells." Emmett glanced at Boze, who nodded. "We'll boil it first, just to be on the safe side."

"That's a good precaution anyway," Kim agreed.

Dean looked at Jerome. "You think Pestilence sent them here, deliberately?"

"I don't know how he could have discovered your location, but yes, that's what it seems like to me," Jerome said.

Dean looked at Bobby. The older man shrugged. "We sent three people out to die, maybe someone found 'em," he said uncomfortably.

"But chances are, he's looking for me," Dean pressed.

"After Wichita, I'd say we're all up the hit list, Dean," Rufus countered calmly. "In any case, we're going to have to double the guards now, every watch is a pair. One to shoot, one to call in. It looked like Stu was so busy shooting them he couldn't spare the time to call in."

Dean nodded. "We need to go on another run asap? Med supplies, more vaccinations, the lab stuff you wanted?" He looked at Kim questioningly.

"Yes, I have a list drawn up, Alex thought that –" She stopped talking as the lights went out.

"What the fuck?" Dean pulled out his flashlight and flicked it on. "We miss something?"

"Must have," Jerome lit the candles on the desk.

Everyone in the room turned fast as a piercing scream came from the back of the building, followed by a crashing and banging.

"That's the basement door," Dean snapped, striding to the door and opening it. "Cas, with me, Rufus, Emmett, get everyone you can find, flamethrowers, meet me down there; Boze, check the perimeter with the rest, make sure they're not on the fucking front porch!"

Bobby watched them race out, looking at Jerome. "Guess we'll stay here," he said sourly, pulling his shotgun from the chair frame and tossing a handgun to the other man. "Might not kill them, but it should hold them long enough for someone to burn 'em before they get to us."

* * *

"Blackout?" Michelle asked as the lights died in the small store room, setting down the box she'd just picked up.

"We don't get blackouts," Lisa whispered. "Is that door open or shut?"

"I don't know."

Lisa's head snapped around as she heard the scream from the basement hallway. She stared helplessly into the darkness, unable to see Michelle who'd been standing no more than three feet away, or her own hand in front of her face.

"Look," Michelle whispered and Lisa looked around, seeing the thin beam of light playing down the hall. Answered the question, she thought. Door was open.

The crash and splintering noise of wood being smashed apart galvanised both women into action. In the narrow hallway that ran between the store rooms, they met Merrin, Chuck and Carolyn, her arms around Prudence and Taylor, eleven-year-olds Alan and Ben staring wide-eyed at the noise. All of them were down here to sort through the supplies that the other camps had requested for the quarantine period.

"What's going on? Did we lose the genny?" Merrin asked them. "We heard a scream."

"We're under attack," Chuck said, turning and pushing the women and children ahead of him. "They must have missed some on the sweep, I don't know, but we've gotta find someplace we can hide, someplace we keep from being noticed."

The sound of footsteps, rushing down the basement steps from the outside door was very loud in the disorienting darkness and they ran down the hall, turning at the end, heading for the deepest rooms where the vegetables were stored. From behind them, there was a sudden volley of gunfire.

* * *

Chuck felt himself shoved from behind, a wave of putrid odour washing over him. He yelled out as he fell forward, the flashlight smashing as it hit the floor. Rolling to the side of the hall, his arms over his head as feet stepped on him, he forced himself to his feet, bracing his back against the wall and turned as a powerful light hit him from behind.

"Chuck, stay out of the way!" Dean yelled, Chuck catching a glimpse of his face and the angel's behind him as they raced past. He saw the flash of the gunfire outlining the corner of the hall, heard screaming and snarling and a dozen shots fired in quick succession, then sobbing in the sudden ringing quietness when the gunshots ceased.

"Everyone alright?" Dean's voice was clear and loud down the hall. "Lise? You okay? You kids, you get hurt? Did they bite you?"

There was a murmuring dissent, and Chuck straightened up against the wall, his fingers checking over his clothing, over his skin, for any tears, anywhere that he could have been infected. Bruises he had in plenty, he thought, wincing at where the croaties' feet had landed on him, but he couldn't feel any telltale trickling liquid.

_Not that it helped much_, he thought shakily. If the croaties had passed on smallpox and – or – the plague, he'd still be dead in a couple of weeks, or less.

"Everyone gets quarantined. Doc's got vaccinations for smallpox and shots for the plague. So long as no one's infected with the croatie virus, we'll be fine," Dean said reassuringly, glancing back over his shoulder at the angel who was bringing up the rear. He wasn't a hundred per cent sure of that, but it sounded better than saying he didn't know.

There was a low chug from somewhere outside and the muted roar of the generator started, the lights coming back on in the basement as they made their way to the stairs to the house.

* * *

Kim looked at them carefully as they came up. "That's where they broke in?"

Dean nodded. "Went after these guys and turned around and came after us when we showed up," he said quietly. "Vaccinations all round, I guess, and the shots, and we all stay together for a while?"

She nodded, glancing at the frightened faces of the women and children and back to him.

"You first, show them how easy it is," she said, meeting his eyes. He held her gaze steadily, ignoring the increase in his heart rate and sitting down on the stool she pushed out for him.

"Sure, nothing to it," he said, his voice only a little higher than usual.

She was gentle and the vaccination was nothing, a scratch on the top of his arm and a small dressing over it. If the tetracycline hadn't hurt like a goddamned sonofabitch, he would have been able to pass it off without turning a hair. As it was, it was only the self-discipline of years that kept his jaw locked tight as she finished the injection and told him to hold the cotton ball tightly against it for a few minutes. She glanced at him, and smiled.

"Gunshot wounds you're fine with, but needles make you sweat?" she asked him softly.

He looked away and shrugged, getting up and walking from the table, leaning against the wall as he watched the rest lining up.

"How long do we stay locked up?" Chuck asked him, holding the ball against the needle hole as he got up from the stool and walked over to the man and angel.

"Boze said that the croatie virus was turning them fast now, fifteen, twenty minutes and we'll know about that," Dean said. "The other two take longer to show up."

"Could you do the other one?" Lisa asked Kim, looking at her right shoulder gingerly. "I got slammed into a wall and it's really tender."

Kim nodded, going around her and lifting the sleeve of her shirt. "You want me to take a look at it?"

Lisa shook her head. "Just a bruise, I think," she said, closing her eyes as Kim scratched her skin with the vaccine. "Not much you can do about it."

By the time Merrin had the tetracycline shot, more than twenty minutes had passed. Dean looked around at them, no one going crazy and attacking anyone else. "Well … that's reassuring."

Chuck nodded. "Where are we staying?"

"Dining room," Kim said. "The others have put cots in for you and taken everything else out. Less to burn if someone is infected."

"Good to know," Dean said dryly.

"You need to put on gloves, masks, booties and a coat," Kim told him, pointing at the boxes on the table by the door. "We'll keep you as sealed off as possible from being able to touch anything or interacting with anything. I'll culture the blood tonight, and I should be able to give you some kind of answer tomorrow."

They walked down to the dining room, as covered up as possible and heard the lock turn behind them. Plates of food and bottles of water were spread over a couple of crates in the centre of the room.

"Room service," Chuck commented weakly. "Makes up for everything."

* * *

"How'd they get in?" Bobby snarled, turning to look at Rona and Ty. The two hunters shook their heads.

"Not through the gate or the fence," Rona snapped back. "Rufus tracked them back to the lake's edge."

Rufus nodded, looking at Bobby. "Can't be sure because the tracks stopped at the little beach, but they probably waded around from the hook while we were fighting the others."

"No wonder the others just kept coming into the kill zones," Max said softly. "Just decoys."

"Look, I realise the virus has mutated a bit, but that's … I mean, that's planning, that's way beyond what the croaties used to be able to manage," Emmett said uneasily. "Sneaking in here, looking for a specific target – am I the only one who's getting' chills from this?"

"Still think that Dean isn't the target?" Jerome looked at Rufus and Bobby.

Neither of the older hunters said anything.

"Doesn't matter who the target was," Ellen said briskly. "And it doesn't matter how well they can plan and hold the blood lust down now. What matters is that they're all dead and been wrapped up and burned, and the basement cleaned and we should be done with it, right?"

"Until the next bunch Pestilence sends at us," Jerome pointed out gently. "He won't stop, not if he's after Dean for killing his brothers."

"That's not the only problem," Alex said from the sofa. "Castiel said that he felt Michael, on this plane, over the past few weeks. He thought it means that Michael has been looking for another vessel."

"There are no other vessels," Bobby argued, frowning at her. She shrugged, gesturing at the door.

"Take it up with Castiel, Bobby," she said. "I'm just passing along the message."

Jerome nodded. "The point being that if there is another vessel, Michael can resume opening seals."

* * *

Dean felt his eyelids dropping again, and he sat up straighter, pushing his back against the wall and looking at his watch.

Two a.m. Long day.

He glanced around the silent room. The outside lights were on, spilling enough ambient light into the room for him to see the outlines of the furniture, the shapes of the sleepers. The children were grouped to one end, the four cots close by each other, all of their occupants motionless, although he could hear their quiet breathing. Chuck and Cas were to his left. Lisa, Michelle, Carolyn and Merrin were grouped on the other side. He didn't have to keep watch, he thought wearily. It just seemed like a prudent thing to do, given the surprises of the last twenty-four hours.

He repressed a yawn and stared at the squares of dim light marking the windows. Emmett had filled him in through the closed door on what had happened up here. He'd found two of the croaties, their hands closed around the live wires from the generator to the inverter that powered the house, extra crispy. Taking out the power like that, that hadn't been typical croatie behaviour, he thought vaguely. That had been … organised … planned … he didn't think the croaties had the ability to hold down their crazy for long enough to come up with something like that.

Unless of course the creator of the virus had planned it that way. Had designed the virus to slowly return the ability to think and override the blood lust that drove them … his eyes widened slightly as the implications of that sank in.

The sound was barely a whisper in the quiet room. Just the brush of fabric over the polished wooden floor. But out of place.

He was on his feet and reaching for the light switch, seeing her face twisted up in rage, as she fell across Carolyn's cot, fingers hooked into claws, reaching out for the boy who was sleeping in the next cot.

"LISA!" Dean roared, and everyone woke.

Lisa turned on her knees on the redhead's cot, backhanding Carolyn as the woman sat up, blinking at the brightness of the light. Carolyn fell back and Lisa launched herself toward him, the woman she'd been, the woman he knew, gone.

"Mom, no!" Ben rolled off the cot, his fingers scrabbling through the air as she moved out of his reach, stumbling to his feet.

"Ben, stay where you are," Dean said sharply, watching her carefully as she slowed down, the .45 automatic in his hand and pointing out at her. Her eyes were red. Bloodshot, or just red, he thought disbelievingly. This wasn't happening, he wanted to shout out. But it was.

"Gonna shoot me, Dean?" Lisa growled at him, moving around the crates that had served as the room's table as he followed her with the barrel of the gun. "Why not? You want to, I know you do."

"No, I don't," he said tightly. He didn't, god he would've given anything not to have been there, not to be here. But he would have to, he thought, a rush of despair rising up through him, a tornado of razor blades, cutting him into pieces. There wasn't a cure. There wasn't another way out.

"Sure you do," she insisted, stopping suddenly and straightening up, the red dying from her eyes as she looked at him almost calmly, almost gently. "This is exactly what you wanted. No one to hold you back, Dean. No one to make demands on you. No one to make you feel bad for not loving back."

"No."

"Mom?" Ben took a step toward and Dean's gaze flickered to him.

"Ben, stay back!"

"Dean, it's Mom!" he said, looking at the man pleadingly. "She's not a croatie. Please! Dean, please, look at her eyes."

Lisa smiled at him, turning to look back at Dean. "Yeah, Dean, look at my eyes."

She turned in a blur, her arm stretching out for the boy and Dean pulled the trigger, the sound of the shots drowning out Ben's screams, drowning his own, trapped inside his head, as he watched her fall to the floor.

* * *

They found the bite mark, deep and torn open on her shoulder. Dr Sui examined everyone else, Renee assisting, for any bites, cuts or tears in the skin. She'd been the only one.

"How the hell did they know about her?" Bobby asked no one in particular, his fear and anger for Dean held down by a thread of control.

"From whoever it was that told Pestilence the location, I presume," Jerome remarked, picking up his glass of whiskey and sipping it. "It wasn't a secret."

"I hope they're in Hell, frying their damned asses off!" Bobby fumed helplessly.

"I would imagine they've had it worse than that," Jerome said.

* * *

Renee touched Alex's shoulder gently, and she turned around to look at her.

"I'm taking Ben and Alan over to Tawas," she said, taking the cup of hot coffee Alex poured her gratefully.

"How's Ben?"

"We had to sedate him," Renee said softly. "He was hysterical, understandably I guess, but Merrin said he was screaming at Dean over and over and she didn't think Dean could take it anymore."

Alex nodded. "It would be better for Ben to get right away from this place."

"Yeah." Renee finished the coffee in a long swallow and put the cup down.

"How's Dean?"

For a moment, Renee didn't say anything, just looked at the cup on the counter. "I don't know. He's … locked inside himself, I guess. Not moving. Not speaking." She looked at Alex, her mouth twisting unhappily. "Shock does that, but it's more than shock."

"Have Bobby or Rufus tried to talk to him?"

"Yeah, Cas too. No luck for any of them," Renee said. "I thought you might …?"

Alex looked at her uncertainly. "He won't talk to me, Renee. Not if he can't to Bobby or Rufus, or Cas. It might be better to leave him be for a while."

"I'm not sure that is the best thing, Alex," Renee said, looking around the kitchen. "At the moment, he's trying to deal with it. It wasn't his fault, there was nothing he could've done differently. Merrin told me that she went for Ben, deliberately, as if she knew that would make him shoot her." She shook her head slightly. "Failing to kill him, would a croatie think that this kind of torture was the next best thing?"

"I don't know."

"What I meant to say was that he could go either way right now. Accept that there was no choice and forgive himself – or – or not," she said. "He needs someone to help with that."

Alex thought of what she knew of him. He would take responsibility for this because he took responsibility for everything, she thought, her heart contracting sharply. Because it was one of the core things about him. She didn't think anyone was going to be able to talk him out of that. And he didn't welcome anyone prying into the way he thought or felt. Not even about little things, certainly not about something like this.

Her imagination gave her a vivid re-enactment of what might've happened, and she closed her eyes tightly. Ben's accusations would be brands on his soul. And Lisa had been his partner, the mother of his child. There was just no way in hell he would be able to talk to anyone about it now. Probably not ever, she thought bleakly.

"I don't think so, Renee." She shook her head. "I don't think he can accept that kind of help."

Renee looked at her for a moment, then nodded, turning away. "I've got to get going."

"Be safe," Alex said automatically, picking up their cups and carrying them to the sink.

* * *

_**Two Days Later**_

"Alex, can I talk to you for a minute?" Bobby turned his chair around on the porch and she nodded, following him to the corner of the house. He pushed his cap back on his head, looking out over the railing to the lake beyond and Alex waited.

"It's about Dean," he said slowly, turning his head to look at her. "What happened, you know it's eating him, from the inside out."

"Bobby, both Renee and Rufus have already asked me this," she said, pre-empting him. "It won't do any good. I don't know why you think it would."

"He's got a soft spot for you, Alex, I know you probably haven't seen it, but we have," Bobby said, looking at her pleadingly. "He might listen to you, might let you in enough to tell him that he's not to blame for this."

"I haven't seen it," she said quietly. "And he won't – don't you get it, don't you understand what he's feeling?"

He looked up at her, his expression slightly puzzled.

"Don't you people know him at all?" she continued, looking away. "What happened, it's never going to okay for him. He knows he had to do it. He probably knew that from the moment he saw that she'd turned. But that doesn't change the fact that it was him pulling the trigger. She was pregnant and in love with him and her son was right there. He can't talk about that, Bobby. He can't _deal_ with that, not now."

"You do know him," Bobby said, a little astonished. "Or is that some kind of psychic feeling you're getting?"

She made a noise in the back of her throat. "No, it's not a psychic thing. It's a human thing. Nothing is going to make this forgivable. Or easier. Just time, and even that's a big maybe."

Ellen walked on to the porch behind her. "You might be right, Alex, and forgive me for noticing but it seems to me like you've got some experience with this."

Bobby watched Alex's expression freeze and wished he could still move his legs, just enough to kick Ellen for pushing so hard at a time like this.

"I don't," Alex said shortly. "Just know enough to know that this isn't a car accident or an accident of any sort. He might've been able to deal with someone else killing her. But …"

"My point," Ellen said. "We need him. He's the only one who has any chance of getting through to –"

"To, uh, taking out Lucifer," Bobby cut her off abruptly. "We need him whole and functioning, Alex. And he's not that now."

Alex looked from Bobby to Ellen. "You might have to accept that he might not be whole and functioning for a while."

"Alex, I know you care about him," Ellen tried again, softening her tone.

Alex turned away from them, leaning against the railing, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her face stony. "If I try, will you leave him alone?"

"Yeah, if you can't get through, we'll leave him alone," Bobby said with a sigh.

"Alright."

* * *

The interior of the garage was gloomy, the shelving and racks, tools and machines looming like half-seen monsters in the dim light. Dean packed the trunk by feel mostly, knowing where everything went, his hands putting things away, fingertips brushing over well-known shapes and textures, finding the places that it all belonged.

He looked around as the shadow cut the light from the doorway, turning back as he recognised the silhouette standing there.

"Hey."

"Hey," Alex said, walking into the garage, stopping beside the car. "Kim said that you were going out on a medical run."

He nodded, settling the bags of salt in their trays, smoothing them down.

"Where are you going?"

He held up the false lid, lifting the shotgun aside and setting it in its place and dropping the lid. "I'll start with Grand Rapids, have a look through Detroit if that doesn't have everything on the list."

"Alone?"

Lifting the gear bag into the trunk, he glanced sideways at her. "Yeah, alone."

"Aren't you the guy who told me that running and hiding never works?" she said lightly, forcing herself not to jump as he slammed down the trunk lid.

"What makes you think that's what I'm doing?" he said brusquely, walking away from her, up the side of the car to the hood.

"It's what I did." She walked slowly up the opposite side of the car after him.

"Yeah, well, I'm not you."

"No, you take a lot more responsibility than I ever did," she agreed, stopping at the corner.

Dean leaned on the frame, looking down into the engine bay. "Alex, I know you think you're trying to help, but stop, okay? Just stop."

"I don't think I can help you, Dean," she said slowly. "I don't think anyone can."

"Good, we're on the same page," he snapped, staring at her. "So how 'bout leaving me alone."

"If it were up to me, I would," she said honestly. "But you have a lot of friends who are genuinely worried about you. They're worried that you're looking for a way out of the pain that won't look too much like suicide."

He drew in a deep breath, his eyes closing briefly as pain, and anger and the fear that was driving it inside, behind his walls, surged up through his chest and into his throat. They all thought it was something that could be fixed, something that could be made better. Ellen and Bobby, Rufus and Cas … and now Alex. He struggled between not wanting it to let out those feelings and hurt her, and not caring if it did. What was one more let down, he thought savagely. At least she would walk away from it.

"You think that's what I'm looking for?" he said finally, keeping his gaze on the carburettor.

"I think that you want to find some action, take some action, because you can't bear the thoughts in your head," she said hesitantly. "I think that you aren't as careful as you would've been, before."

Inside himself, he flinched back at her words, nailing him so accurately. He knew that he was looking for a release, for violence and mayhem, for something to turn the vitriol in his head away from himself and onto something else.

That knowledge brought a deep burning shame, that he wanted to escape that way, that she'd seen it, and he turned around, his voice low and hard and angry. "Don't talk to me as if you know what's happening inside my head, Alex. You don't. You ever kill someone close to you?"

She looked at him and he saw an expression flit across her features too fast for him to decipher. It rang an alarm bell in him though. She dropped her gaze and shook her head.

"No, I haven't."

"Then you don't know shit about what's going on with me," he snapped, forgetting the fragmentary expression he'd seen. "I don't quit and I'm not running. I'm not like you." He hesitated as he saw her face freeze up, cringing away from him, the second's fleeting satisfaction at finding a way to hurt her twisting his gut.

"I have a job to do, it's just the one big job, really. And I'm gonna do it. I have to," he continued. "I'm not going to check myself out or give up until that job's done. So you can save the heart-to-heart bullshit. Just leave me the hell alone."

"You got it," she said, her face stiff as she turned away.

He watched her walk out, wiping his palms on the legs of his jeans irritably, leaning his forehead against the edge of the raised hood, sucking in air that felt like it wasn't getting down deep enough. She wasn't right, he told himself, ignoring the knowledge somewhere deeper, that it was a lie. He wanted to get the fucking job done. That's all. And he didn't want anyone around who might get hurt because of him, who might die because of him. No one else.

He knew what he looked like. He hadn't slept and couldn't eat. When he closed his eyes, he saw the flash from the end of the gun over and over, heard Ben's screams over and over, saw Lisa drop to the ground, the pulped and bloody mess next to her son's feet all that was left of her head … over and over and over. Whiskey wouldn't drown out those screams or wash away those images and he couldn't afford to take anything stronger, not that it would've done much anyway. That moment was locked inside, along with the rest of the memories that he'd never been able to rid himself of, and he would be reliving them for the rest of his life, a crippling punishment that had no end.

* * *

The Impala was nothing more than a patch of black against the black of the forest behind it, and he walked down the porch steps quietly, carrying his boots, stopping at the bottom to drag them on and lace them up.

He opened the driver's door and slid in, jumping as he saw the shadowy figure in the passenger seat from the corner of his eye.

"Jesus, Cas!"

"You're not going alone." The angel turned his head to look at him.

"Get out of my car," Dean said impatiently, turning the key.

"No."

For a moment, he was tempted to right cross the sonofabitch and lug his unconscious body back to the steps. He decided against it purely because he'd probably end up breaking his knuckles on the angel's jaw. He could dump Cas somewhere up the road, when the angel needed to relieve himself, and drive off with no further damage.

"Suit yourself." He put the car in gear and drove slowly up to the gate, watching it instead of looking up at Risa and Ty. When it had opened enough to let them through, he hit the accelerator, the car speeding out smoothly.

"Where are we going?" Castiel glanced in the side mirror, seeing Ty on the radio as Risa closed the gate behind them.

"Grand Rapids," Dean said shortly.

"How long will –"

"Not interested in a conversation, man." Dean glanced at him. "Shut it or walk back."

Castiel shrugged slightly, turning to look out the window at the darkness surrounding them. He was here. That would have to be enough to start with.

* * *

_**Grand Rapids, Michigan**_

Dean looked down the list Kim and Merrin had given him, checking off what he'd found against it. Half the damned names were incomprehensible and he had to read them a couple of times to make sure that he'd got the right thing. The equipment was easier. There were still a few things missing. For a second, he wished he'd brought Alex, who would know what they were, and probably where to find them. He pushed that thought down and pretended he'd never had it, swinging down off the concrete dock and loading the boxes into the car. Detroit wasn't that far, and somewhere he'd find a phone book that he could check for supply houses.

He thought about the other part of his plan as he pushed the boxes around on the seat and floor, stacking them in tightly. He wondered if it was suicidal. Jerome hadn't seemed to think so.

"_You want to what?"_

_Dean looked worriedly around the corner of the living room they were sitting in at the squawk of the professor's voice. "Trap Pestilence, and take his ring," he said in a low voice._

"_There is a trap for the Horsemen, of course," Jerome said. "Lucifer is using it to keep Death bound. But it's complex and the ingredients are not all that easy to come by. They might be impossible to locate in the circumstances in which we find ourselves now."_

"_I'll figure that out," Dean said. "Do you have the trap and the list?"_

"_Yes, memorising all sorts of things like that is required by our initiation," Jerome said distractedly. "Dean, it's not just trapping Pestilence that's the problem."_

"_No? What is?"_

"_It's protecting yourself."_

"_I'll be alright."_

"_No. You won't," Jerome said forcefully. "This is Pestilence. He gives you a disease, or a hundred diseases, and they're in you. It's not a spell that wears off if you kill him. He could kill you fast or slow just being within a certain distance of you. You need protection against that, to protect the body – your body – against his power."_

"_Okay," Dean said impatiently. "So do you have that?"_

"_Not that easy, my boy."_

_Dean snorted. "Naturally. When is it ever?"_

"_Precisely." Jerome looked around the room. "For a physical protection spell like that, something permanent is needed, something that goes deeper than just paint on the skin."_

_Dean looked at him narrowly. "Like a tattoo?"_

"_Similar, but this is a Horseman we're talking about it, so it will need to be deeper than the standard tattoo. Think cicatrices. Think scars."_

"_Great," he acknowledged sourly, lifting a shoulder as if he'd expected nothing less. "Okay, so you need to do a bit of carving?"_

"_Well, not me, I'm not really qualified," Jerome said, looking down at the table. "You'll have to ask either Dr Sui to do it, or one of the nurses. Bobby has most of what we need, I believe. Alex will probably have the rest in the garden."_

_Dean baulked at that. "No. You can do it, or I can do it."_

"_Then you'll have to do it."_

The cuts had scabbed over mostly, they weren't deep but with the natural herbs and pigments rubbed into them, they were obvious. Jerome had mentioned that the colour would probably fade out over time, but the fine white lines that would be left as scars would stay forever. He didn't care.

There were three ingredients for the trap, however, that they hadn't had, that he still needed to get. And he wasn't sure where the hell he was going to get them.

"You done here?" Castiel looked at him.

Dean nodded as he loaded the last few boxes in. "Detroit, next stop."

The angel didn't comment, just got into the car. Dean felt his mouth lift at one corner. He'd nearly managed to leave Cas behind a couple of times, and the element of surprise for another trick like that had gone.

* * *

_**Detroit, Michigan**_

The black car cruised slowly down the street, sashaying gently from side to side as Dean tried to read the burned out store signs and avoided the wrecks that were still lying across the road.

_The Dragon's Tongue._

He pulled into the kerb and passed Cas the shotgun. "I'm going to be a few minutes in here," he said tersely. "You guard the car."

Castiel nodded, resigned to the post. Not that the shotgun would have much effect on anything that tried to attack him. It would warn Dean of trouble though.

Stepping through the shattered glass of the front door, Dean felt his hopes drop as he looked around the torn apart interior of the store. Everything that had been on the shelves had been swept to the floor, or thrown against the walls, shredded and trodden upon and smashed, mostly beyond recognition.

He walked to the back, and tried the rear door. It was locked. Pulling out his picks, he opened the lock and pushed it wide. It opened into a short corridor, a door at either end and one right in front of him. Turning left, he tried the first door, finding a bathroom. Door number two, set into the centre of the corridor led to a small kitchen. Door number three proved to be the winner, leading to a set of stairs and a basement stock room.

At the bottom of the stairs, he stopped, staring around the room in astonishment. A little bit more than a few minutes, he thought, with a mental apology to the angel waiting outside. The room was floor to ceiling shelving and every inch of the shelves were covered with boxes, large and small, all white cardboard, with neatly printed labels on the outward ends. He might still be looking for the fucking ingredients in the middle of next week.

Lifting the flashlight, he decided to work from the bottom shelves up. He could do the ones above his head with the rolling ladder after the first full pass.

The first thing he'd needed was powdered cat bones. He hadn't asked Jerome why, not wanting another half hour explanation of the esoteric nature of bones. He found it on the third from the bottom shelf halfway around the room. Extracting the box, he tucked into his jacket pocket and kept going. The second ingredient was dragon's tears, a rare and expensive crystalline structure that resembled a tear, but was pure white obsidian, found occasionally near underwater volcanoes and treasured in the magical arts. That box was on the top shelf of the shelving in the centre of the room. The box joined the cat bones in his pocket and he glanced at his watch. He'd been in here for forty minutes. He had to get moving.

The third ingredient was knitbone, and he went twice around the room before he saw the word on a label in front of him, in small italic font under the larger common name – comfrey. Stifling a groan, he grabbed the box and shoved it into his pocket, swearing softly but creatively at Jerome's inability to get Alex to understand what was needed. He knew for a fact that she had a massive comfrey plant next to the swampy ground at the edge of the garden in camp.

Climbing the stairs, he relocked both the basement door and the back room door. It was a useful store, and he'd let Bobby know about it, if he survived the coming task, to get all of the stuff back to Chitaqua.

The angel was still sitting in the car, looking agitated as he came around the front and got in.

"A few minutes?"

"It was a big store room," Dean said blandly, starting the engine. He really did need to be rid of Cas for the next part.

* * *

_**Crossroad of CR 18 and CR 24, Michigan**_

"What are we doing here?" Castiel looked around curiously. "A crossroads? Are you planning on making a deal?"

"Not exactly," Dean said, pulling to one side of the road and turning off the engine. "Need you to look at something."

The angel turned his head toward him and Dean's fist snapped out, hitting Cas on the point of the jaw, driving it back toward the nerve centre behind the ear, just enough to knock him out. He rested his fingers against the side of the angel's neck, feeling the steady pulse against the tips and nodded to himself. It wasn't as bad as the last time, and he wondered again how much of Cas was pure human now.

Getting out, he walked back to the trunk and unlocked it, pulling out the ingredients he'd gotten from camp, adding the three boxes from the store room in Detroit, and lifting the false lid to get the beaten copper bowl from the back corner. He added each required ingredient, in its precise quantity and lifted the bowl down, replacing the remains back in the trunk. Lighting a match, he dropped it into the bowl, waiting for the mixture to burn down to a cool grey ash. Then he pulled out the gallon jug of blood and mixed the ashes into it.

The road was asphalt and the blood and ash mixture flowed surprisingly easily over it. He was worried that he was going to run out of it before he'd finished the entire thing, but the last brush load finished the design exactly and he put the near-dry brush into the bowl and to one side, standing up and looking over the design carefully. It was correct. That was a little surprising as well. Sam had done most of the draughtsmanship in their spell work.

The trap consisted of a very large circle, holding another seven circles. Each circle represented an Apocalyptic seal, Jerome had told him. Pestilence was the third seal, along with Famine. He looked down at the third circle, pulling out the hex bag that protected him from demon sight. He lit the bag and dropped it into the circle at his feet, stepping back and drawing his knife.

The bag burned a bright blue, turning to green as it disappeared entirely.

* * *

_**Las Vegas, Nevada**_

The Horseman sat up straight in the chair, turning his head from side to side as he triangulated the position of the man.

"He's come out to play," he said gleefully. "And I'm going to show him what pain is."

The demon stood near the door, licking her lips nervously. Tasked with protecting the Horseman, with providing for his every wish, she didn't like the look on his face.

"He has a track record with Horseman, sir."

"Yes, my dear, he does. But not for much longer."

"But –"

"Oh no, no buts," Pestilence said, the smile he directed at her chilling.

"Sir, we're under strict orders not to kill Michael's vessel," she tried again hesitantly.

"Well if Lucifer wants him so bad," Pestilence said, turning toward her. "He can glue him back TOGETHER!"

He disappeared.

* * *

_**Crossroad of CR 18 and CR 24, Michigan**_

Dean stepped back as a man appeared in the third circle, tall and gawky-looking, broad-shouldered but thin.

"Mr Winchester, the lesser son," the Horseman said cheerfully, a wide, demented grin on his face. He took a step forward and stopped, unable to move out of the circle. Looking down, the cheerfulness vanished and his face was twisted in a fury as he looked up again.

"That's me," Dean said agreeably. "And you're Pestilence, the whiny, sick kid of the family, right?"

"You can't bind me, I'm already held," Pestilence spat at him. Dean watched him twist the ring on his finger around, the pale green stone set into it gleaming slightly in the light from the car.

"Sorry, no throwing your little cook-ups at me today." Dean smiled coldly at him. "Which one of the poor saps we throw out did you pick up?"

"Ah … Jake? I'm glad he made it all the way to Toledo. It wasn't a sure thing," Pestilence smiled at him.

"Jake, huh?" Dean nodded. "No big loss."

"No, he couldn't wait to spill all your little secrets," the Horseman agreed. "And how's your Lisa, by the way?"

Dean looked at him, keeping his face as expressionless as he could. He hadn't been expecting that.

"Out of your reach."

Pestilence smiled widely, looking into his eyes, digging for his pain. "Oh … you had to kill her? Awkward."

"You son of a bitch," Dean said softly, stepping toward the circle.

The temperature dropped and Dean stared at his breath, frosty white in front of his face, the Horseman's breath also condensing in the frigid air.

"Dean, you've been hiding yourself too well."

He turned his head. Lucifer stood at the rim of the largest circle, watching him through his little brother's eyes. The fallen angel raised his hand slightly and Pestilence dropped to his knees.

"Thanks for finding this one for me," Lucifer continued. "He's been running off leash for a few weeks now. Oh, and Sammy says hi, by the way."

Looking at him, Dean forced himself to smile. "Sam, anytime you're ready, man."

Lucifer laughed, turning to the Horseman. "See now, this is why I told you to stay away from him, Sam's big brother just doesn't know when to lie down and die."

He took a step toward Dean. Dean took a step back, keeping his eyes on Sam's face, aware that Lucifer didn't want to step into the trap. _Not Sam_, Dean told himself as his brother's eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

"You're not as dumb as I've been led to believe, are you?"

Dean took another step back, following the curve of the circle. "Don't get too comfortable in there, that's temporary accommodation," he told the angel.

Lucifer smiled automatically, but Dean noticed that it didn't reach his eyes, which were still wary. What the fuck did Lucifer have to be worried about him, he wondered remotely.

The light hit them like a spotlight, silver-white, brilliant, sudden. Dean turned his head away, closing his eyes against the brightness. On the other side of the trap, Lucifer did the same, his vessel's eyes more vulnerable than his own.

"It's not time," he shouted out to the light.

The light dimmed down to outline softly the figure who stood between Dean and the fallen angel. "No, it's not. And you will not harm my vessel as I may not harm yours. Not until it is time."

The voice was deep and mellifluous, a warm baritone with a rich timbre. The body was Adam Milligan. Taller. Broader. Older looking, Dean thought. But still his half-brother.

"You have a vessel, Michael. Dean is expendable," Lucifer snapped.

"This is … a substitute only." Michael shrugged. "I'd still like the original."

"Brother against brother, Michael. Even in our vessels. Doesn't smell like sour grapes to you?"

Dean moved around the circle a little further, closer to Pestilence, aware that neither angel was paying him much attention. The knife was still in his hand, the blade flat against the outside of his leg. He crossed into the trap.

"Unlike you, brother, I don't question the Divine Will. I obey. And for all your rationalisations, your excuses and justifications, you wilfully rebelled."

Lucifer's mouth stretched out in a cold smile. "Do you hear yourself, Michael? That on-the-nose superiority? Try this … now that I'm here, how 'bout I tip the odds a little more in my favour." He spun around to face Dean, lifting his hand, the palm glowing a molten white.

"DEAN! NOW!"

The shout came from the car and a blue-white light filled the crossroads, etching every detail into bold relief, every pebble on the road, every leaf on the trees, every line on their faces and lash and hair as the angels were dragged through the banishing spell and sent back to their planes.

Dean dove across the trap, ignoring the skin torn off his hands as he landed next to the Horseman, one hand locking around his thin wrist, the other slamming the edge of the blade across the long fingers that lay flat on the road.

The scream drilled into his ears as the Horseman's fingers were severed, and he grabbed the one with the ring, rolling backwards out of the third circle, and spitting out the blood he could feel trickling down the back of his throat from the pressure bleed. He turned away from the trap, leaving Pestilence inside of it, the Horseman rocking back and forth over his mutilated hand.

Walking fast back to the car, he yanked open the driver's door and slid inside, staring at the angel in the passenger seat. Cas' forearm was dripping blood, his hand still over the sigil drawn on the glass of the window beside him.

"Nice move," Dean said, with a grudging admiration.

"Here to help." Cas lifted his hand and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wrapping it around the cut on his arm. "Can we go home now?"

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Bobby and Jerome sat on either side of the desk, looking at the ring that sat in the centre of the blotter.

"Took a lot of risks to get this, Dean," Bobby said finally, raising his eyes to meet the younger man's.

Dean looked back at him coolly, silently daring the old man to throw the accusation at him.

"Well, you got it anyway," Jerome said, breaking through the tension between them. "Michael was in your half-brother, you say?"

"Yeah." Dean nodded, sitting in the chair in front of the desk. "Where's Rufus?"

"Handling a supply run," Bobby said shortly. "The slave setup is the same in Boulder. Lotta the folks you brought back know about it."

Dean nodded, chewing the corner of his lip as he thought about the shifting priorities. Seeing Sam, seeing the devil in his brother, that had changed things.

"We've got the key to Jerome's library now," he said slowly. "It's time we got some answers."

"Kansas is a hornet's nest right now, Dean," Bobby said, brows pulling together as he looked at the younger man. "You want to stir 'em up again?"

"No, definitely sneak and peek," Dean said. "But we need more information, and you said it's there." He looked at Jerome.

"It is," Jerome agreed readily. "A shame we're not closer, it would be impossible to bring the entire contents back here, but as Mr Singer has pointed out, the state is dangerous right now. I'll have to go with you, of course."

Dean's brows shot up. "Well, we'll see who goes."

Bobby poured out three whiskeys and pushed a glass across the desk to Dean.

"Alright. How'd you do with the medical supplies?"

"Got everything Kim and Ray wanted. Where's Alex, I thought she'd be inventorying them?"

Bobby glanced at Jerome, neither man meeting the hunter's eyes. "Uh, oh, she moved over to Camp Tawas, a few days ago. Said Ellen was better suited to here."

Dean nodded, looking away. He tipped up his glass, the liquid fire burning down his throat and landing cold in his stomach.


	12. Chapter 12 Nothing is Pure

**Chapter 12 Nothing is Pure**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The cabin was quiet, especially after getting used to the muted but constant noise in the main house. It was the closest to the lake, divided from house and the other cabins by a thin screen of trees, and at night, Dean could only hear the occasional cry of loon or owl, the distant splash of fish in the lake, his own breathing, the occasional sigh of contracting timber as the night temperatures cooled the place.

He'd moved out of the house when he'd returned from Detroit. Too many ghosts followed him around in there, and when he had to see Bobby or Rufus or Ellen, he kept his head down, his eyes on the floor, until he'd reached the office or the kitchen. He'd picked up a fridge and a stove from East Tawas and he ate alone in the cabin whenever possible, reading and rereading the few books from Bobby's library they'd brought with them on the lore of the biblical Apocalypse, and its countdown.

It was warm in the cabin, the night air still and heavy, and he threw back the light covers, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring at the dark wall opposite. A part of the reason for moving had been the constant concern he'd felt pushing at him – from Ellen, from Rufus, from Bobby and the others. It was well-meaning, but it grated against him, rubbed him raw from trying to anticipate and deflect their looks, their questions, their demands.

He knew now that they'd sent Alex to talk to him, believing for whatever reason that she would get through where they couldn't. Replaying that conversation in the dark garage over and over in his head, he'd realised that she hadn't wanted to be there. Even at the time, he'd known that his defences had risen so quickly because she'd been right, had seen what was driving him. Had called him on it. And he'd reacted anyway, lashing out instinctively, knowing what would hurt enough to back her off. He hadn't seen her, except in the distance, since.

Ben wouldn't look at him or talk to him, veering in another direction when he'd been up at Tawas and seen him. He didn't blame the kid, seeing his mother gunned down in front of him by the man who supposed to be protecting them didn't leave much room for forgiveness.

He got up restlessly and walked out of the bedroom, crossing the living room without looking around, opening the front door and walking down to the lake's edge. The water was cool on his feet as he stood there, watching the silver track of the moon along one side of the smooth surface.

He wanted to do something, anything, that was out of here and didn't bring reminders every day. Something that would make him think of something else so that he could sleep at night without the memories crowding close and suffocating him.

Kansas was still crawling with demons, but he had one hex bag left. And maybe Acker's library would hold the answers they needed, or enough so that he could go and confront Lucifer down in Atlanta and save his brother, or die in the trying.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Alex saw Ben's head lift with the sound of the deep rumble in the road outside, his gaze shifting from the chessboard between them to the window and back to her.

"I'll finish this later, I've got some stuff I need to do," he said, getting up.

"Ben," she said quietly. It'd been five weeks and the boy ran every time he heard the car, or caught sight of it coming up the winding road from the ruins of the town.

"I really do have things to do, Alex," he said, glancing at the door to the hall as the engine stopped. He bit his lower lip, catching it between his teeth, his gaze flicking between her and the hall.

"We've talked about this," she reminded him gently.

"I know," he said, his voice cracking a little, breaking high. "But I can't, not today, please?"

She wasn't any better, she knew, and her hypocrisy ate at her. She nodded and watched him disappear through the side door, getting to her feet and walking after him as she heard the voices on the porch, one of them too deep and distinctive to mistake for anyone else. At least he gave them time to disappear, she thought uncomfortably as she slipped out, heading for the garden. The car was as good an early warning as a siren would've been.

Walking across the wide orchard, she automatically checked the ripeness of the fruit. They'd lucked out with the people from Kansas, more than a dozen had been farmers or farm contractors, with experience on the land to help get the farms and gardens back into good order. Their own vegetable garden was flourishing, almost as well as the Chitaqua one, although she missed the herbs. She'd have to go over there and take cuttings to plant them out here. One day.

The Tawas garden was walled to the north, with the stones they'd cleared from the site, and fenced off from the cows and goats and sheep that kept the field it bounded grazed short with a high picket fence. Wandering through the neatly tended beds, her eyes noting the progress of the plants without needing to think about it, she stopped at the end and sat down cross-legged on the grass, resting her head on one hand.

She'd moved up here in anger, abandoning the place that had become her home, the people she'd trusted, the responsibilities she'd had. Running again. Just like he'd said.

When Renee had told her he'd gone to face Pestilence and had returned with the Horseman's ring, she'd wondered if it had even been him she'd been angry with. She hadn't wanted to confront him, to ask him to talk about the guilt and the shame and the pain that had been devouring him. She'd known it wouldn't work from the beginning. And they'd apologised, Ellen and Bobby, for asking her to do it. But it hadn't been their fault either, not really. She could've said no.

The knowledge that she'd somehow thought he might trust her enough … that'd seeped in slowly over the last four weeks. Her anger, her decision to run, had, as usual, been directed at herself.

It didn't matter, she told herself firmly. What was more important was that Ben was starting to process his feelings about it. She didn't even know why he'd come to her, telling her about his nightmares, about his conflicting feelings of hatred for the man he'd once loved like a father. But he had, and talking about it had somehow helped him, to get things clear, to set aside the terrible tangle of emotions that had surrounded his memories and see a bit more of the truth, day by day.

He still loved Dean, she thought. He'd been happy when his mother had told everyone about the baby, that they would be a family. It'd taken him a long time to admit that even then, he'd known, not acknowledged, not even to himself, but had known that Dean hadn't felt the happiness his mother had.

He'd told her that slowly, the realisations and revelations coming out over a period of weeks, and it'd come as a surprise to Alex to hear it. She'd resisted the temptation to ask him about it. For Ben, it was all too obvious that he thought that what his mother had said, in the moments before she'd been killed, could have had some truth. Alex doubted that anything Lisa had said after she'd been turned had come from who she'd been, but she wasn't sure how to help Lisa's son understand that.

They'd talked about the disease, the virus, and how it had been designed to change people, to change their very core character. He'd understood that, she thought, at least in an academic way. It didn't seem to affect his doubts. It would take talking to Dean, talking to him and listening to him, and seeing it in his face to convince him that there hadn't been any truth in what his mother had said, she thought. And he wasn't ready to face Dean.

From Merrin's account, Alex thought that the infected woman had been deliberately provocative, setting thoughts in her son's mind, in her partner's mind, that would torture even after she was dead. The idea that a virus might be able to that … that she didn't want to think about too deeply.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean looked around the room, at the familiar faces, people he knew, people he trusted. "Look, we need whatever information we can get, and we're not going to be able to get it from any place else."

"He has a point," Jerome remarked.

"No one asked you," Bobby snapped at him irritably. He looked back at Dean. "You want to get the information, fine, send Rufus, send Boze or Emmett, to go with this guy – you're the one they want, Dean – Heaven and Hell – it ain't good _sense_ to stick your neck out on this, especially not into Kansas where every demon is probably just itchin' to carve their initials into your hide!"

"The others aren't connected to the order, Singer," Jerome said coolly. "Dean was supposed to be a legacy, it's his place to learn about this."

"Shut up with that crap talk, Ackers," Bobby growled, glowering at him. "Your damned delusions and myths about this 'order' haven't given us one solid piece of information yet."

"Except the spell to release the Martyrs, of course," Jerome reminded him caustically.

"Fine, yeah, except that," Bobby said, throwing his hands up in disgust.

Dean stood up, shaking his head. "Doesn't matter, Bobby. I need to see this place. And I'm not hiding here and sending anyone out there in my place to do my job."

"Dammit, I knew you were gonna say that." Bobby pushed his cap back, his face screwed up with frustration. "Are you not gettin' that you're the one they want? The rest of us might as well be invisible for the notice we've gotten."

"I've got one of the extra crunchy hex bags left," Dean said, ignoring that. "It'll keep us hidden from the hell contingent. The angels can't see me at all."

He turned at looked at Jerome. "You want to come along, I'll be leaving before dawn tomorrow morning."

Jerome nodded.

Dean looked at Bobby, shrugging slightly at the old man's expression. "You don't need me here, and I-I need to find out whatever I can. I'll bring back as much as we can carry."

He turned away and opened the door of the office, stepping out and closing it behind him. Ellen glanced at Bobby and got up, following him out.

* * *

Halfway down the long hall, Dean heard her footsteps behind him, stopping when he reached the front door and turning to face her.

"Ellen," he said resignedly, waiting for her arguments.

"You know we haven't got more than a snowball's chance of winning this thing," she said tightly, stopping in front of him. "And that's with you. Without you, there's no chance at all."

He looked away. He'd heard all this before. He knew, in every threadbare detail, the responsibility that lay on him.

"What do you want from me, Ellen?" he asked her, exasperation filling his voice.

"I want you to realise that war has casualties, Dean," she said, frowning at him. "I want you to remember the priorities here."

"You think I could ever forget them?" he said bitterly, gall rising in his throat at the injustice of her veiled accusation. "You think I don't think about what I have to do every damned second of every damned day?"

"I think you're trying to deal with this on your own instead of letting us help," she said, her face twitching a little as she heard the acid edge in his voice.

"You can't help." He smiled sourly at her. "It doesn't _help_ to keep pushing at me to talk about this shit as if talking about it is gonna do anything. It doesn't help me to stay here, seeing everything I don't know, when I could be looking for what we need," he said levelly. "It doesn't help that you and Bobby and Rufus pushed Alex into trying to talk to me when I couldn't hang onto the little control I had and drove her out of her own home."

"Dean, I'm sorry about Alex," Ellen said, her breath gusting out as she dropped her gaze. "When she left, I realised that – we knew she cared about you, and Rufus thought … well, never mind about that, we thought she had the best chance of –"

"Of what?" he cut her off impatiently, unable to make sense of what she was trying to say. "Of fixing me? You think I didn't know that I had to kill Lisa? That I couldn't risk her infecting Ben, or anyone else in that room? You think that I thought I could've done it differently, somehow?" He shook his head, his tone derisive. "I shot her dead, Ellen. That was the problem – _is_ the problem – I _know_ there was nothing else I could've done, but it doesn't change the fact that's what I did, and I have to live with it, try to live with it … no one else, just me. How is talking about that gonna help?"

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah, I am too," he said, his anger and impatience disappearing as he looked at her. "Stop trying to fix things, Ellen. Please. It doesn't help. And sometimes, most of the time, it makes it a lot worse."

She nodded unwillingly, catching her lip between her teeth and turning away, and he walked away from her, going through the main door and down the porch steps and turning right to the path that led to his cabin. His pulse was too fast and he couldn't breathe, reaction setting in with everything the damned woman had said. It never fucking well helped, all this going over and over the shit that happened, the crap he was drowning in. The only thing he'd ever found that helped was work. And whiskey. Preferably a lot of both.

Slowing down as he turned away from the drive and moved into the shadows of the trees, he pulled in a deep breath, expelling it fast and drawing in another.

… _we knew she cared about you …_ Ellen's words drifted back to him as he walked up to the cabin door.

Did she? Maybe she had. Maybe that's why she'd tried to talk to him. Maybe that's how she'd known what he'd been feeling, thinking. If she had, she didn't now, he thought. Going up to Tawas to talk to Boze that afternoon, there hadn't been any sign of her or Ben, although Renee had said they'd been playing chess in the living room just before he'd arrived. The chessboard had been there, the pieces in play, the game abandoned – probably as soon as they'd heard the engine.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

The road was gravel, bumpy and indistinct in the mauve light that filled the sky and filtered down through the canopies of the trees arching overhead. The headlights weren't doing much and Dean peered ahead, trying to make out the curves before he hit them.

"Slow down," Jerome said quietly, sitting beside him in the passenger seat. "I'll tell you when to stop, the rest of the way we'll do on foot."

Glancing sideways, Dean lifted a brow at him. "On foot?"

"Well, you'll be on foot, and pushing me in the chair," Jerome amended acerbically. "Stop."

The black car stopped, the idle of the engine loud in the silence of the woods. "Here?"

Jerome nodded. "There are spells on the place, illusions mostly. I can't see through them, and I imagine you can't either. It's better to take it slowly."

Shrugging, Dean turned off the engine and opened his door. At once, there was a movement in the air in the woods to the left and a soft, grey fog began to fill the spaces between the trees, cold and damp, spreading creeping tendrils across the road. Which wasn't a road, he thought, looking down. More like a forest path, covered in layers of dead leaves and filling his nostrils with the scent of vegetative decay. _Illusions, huh_.

"You fall into a hole?" Jerome's voice sounded muffled in the car, but the annoyance was clear.

"Yeah, little white rabbit hole," Dean muttered, opening the back door and pulling out the folding wheelchair. As he locked the frame into position and pushed it around the car, he felt the smooth roll of the wheels over the ground through his hands – not the mushy feel that a forest path would have, but the firm feel of something solid and hard beneath them.

He lifted the man out of the car seat and into the chair, closing the door, the squeak and clunk absorbed by the mist that surrounded them completely now.

"_Ixia na braxis, lurente na nom, aratavio_," Jerome muttered softly, lifting his hands a little. Dean watched as the mist parted reluctantly in front of them, rising and fluttering to each side like diaphanous curtains.

"Okay." He pushed the scholar's chair ahead, looking around warily as they appeared to walk into thicker forest, and the ground's surface changed again, this time into paved stones, moss and lichen filling the gaps between the stones. The back of his neck prickled uncomfortably, the sensation growing as he walked further from the car.

Within a few minutes, pressing ahead along the uneven path (_but the chair was still moving smoothly_), Dean could feel his hands slipping on the chair's handles, slimy with sweat. It trickled down his neck into the collar of his shirt, and he could feel his pulse, pounding against his ribs, his breath coming a little faster. He stopped to wipe his palms against his jeans, and Jerome twisted around, looking to the side of the path.

"Fear spell," he said matter-of-factly, gesturing to a branch next to the path. Dean turned to look, jumping slightly as he noticed a small, wizened face hanging in the air under it. His eyes focussed on it and he realised that it was a bat's head, hung by a thread from the branch, the wrinkled-up snout and long, tapered ears that looked so much like a tiny, evil human face, just a well-preserved object. The knowledge didn't stop the physical reactions, but it gave him a handle on them.

"Right."

Jerome gestured ahead, and they moved forward. In the thick woods that surrounded them, Dean could hear movement, rustles and sighs and the crackle of weight over the undergrowth, the thump of feet on a hollow log, whispering at the very edge of his hearing from time to time. He ignored the sounds, and the mist, and the trees that pressed ever closer to them, ignored the glimpses in his peripheral vision of shapes and flickering movement, kept his gaze straight ahead, the smooth progress of the wheelchair's rubber tyres over a hard surface felt through his hands reminding him that none of it was real.

"_Ana marisan, dovenicles_," Jerome said, a little more loudly, his voice swallowed up by the fog and the vegetation. "_Te mor ixia na levicus na ast mallacarn_."

The roar came out of the forest to their left and Dean started, his hand leaping to the gun in his pocket, the automatic out and swinging around. From the same direction, he could hear something moving, something big, breaking branches and thudding over the ground, and he sucked in a breath, his eyes wide as he searched the gloomy murk under the trees.

"Dean," Jerome said quietly. "Put the gun away. It's just an illusion."

"Doesn't sound like an illusion," Dean snapped, unwillingly thumbing the safety back on, sliding the gun into his pocket.

"The spells here are strong, to keep the curious away, and those more determined," Jerome insisted, ignoring the crashing in the forest, the heavy stentorian breathing just beyond their sight, the low growls and snarls that came through the muffling fog in distorted waves of sound. "But they're just spells."

He made a curious gesture, his wrist twisting upwards, and the noises ceased abruptly, the silence profound with their absence.

"Not much further," the scholar said, waving his hand ahead.

"So … you work spells, but you're not witches?" Dean asked, lifting a hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead as he looked around.

"No, these spells are just … wards, really," Jerome told him, his voice reassuringly bland. "Like the sigils and traps you draw to protect against demons, they're not really active." He thought about it for a moment. "Like a looped video, they have a trigger – which is movement in their designated area – and they just play when it's activated."

"Uh huh."

He smiled at the hunter's disbelieving tone. "There's a lot for you to catch up on."

Dean looked down at him, mouth twisting to one side as he registered the implications of the words.

"I don't have the time to get into this stuff, you know, Prof," he said slowly, pushing the chair forward.

"You'll have to make the time," Jerome said sharply, hearing the reluctance in his voice. "Later if not sooner. What the order did, what we do, it's vital."

Dean swallowed the comment that rose. This … legacy … or whatever Ackers wanted to call it, it wasn't for him. Sam would've jumped at it, he thought, research and study and learning, but Sam wasn't here, and this wasn't him. In any case, he thought, 'vital' was icing the devil and freeing his brother. There was nothing else that was 'vital' in his world.

"Stop."

He waited as Jerome looked around carefully. The woods seemed no different from the ones they'd already come through, the mist clinging to the edges, the ground under them back to the soft and yielding thickness of a forest path.

Ackers pulled out the small, carved box Jo and Ty had retrieved from Wichita. He pressed the edge of the box and a lid slid open, the box unfolding as it lay on his hand. Dean looked down at the oddly wrought iron key it revealed.

"Take the key," Jerome said softly, looking to the right at a gnarled and bent oak tree a few feet into the forest.

Dean reached out and picked out of the box carefully. It felt very heavy, as if it were made from gold – or lead – rather than a lighter metal.

"The oak." Jerome pointed to the tree. "You have to find the lock."

In the tree, Dean wondered? He walked to it, reaching out to touch the rough bark tentatively. Under the pads of his fingers, it was rough, splintery. It felt like bark. He looked at the end of the key and back to the whorls and swirls in the trunk's surface, looking at the shadows and knots, letting his eyes move over the rough bark and search for the same shape, pushing aside his mind's insistence that he was looking at a fucking tree, for god's sake, not a door.

He saw the oddly shaped shadow in the centre of a deep knot, beneath a thin, new branch, and pushed the end of the key against it.

And he was standing in front of a wide, high iron door, the surface pitted with age, black, with an oily gleam that caught the light and made iridescent patterns across the surface. Looking around, he saw that he'd somehow come down a short flight of concrete steps, was standing just below ground level, the hillside that hadn't been there before rising around and above him, the door set into a heavy metal frame that was embedded in the earth.

He turned the key, and from deep inside the door, he heard a series of heavy clunks, the rattle of a mechanism, turning wheels or gears. He stepped back as the door moved a little when the echo of the last metallic thud faded away.

"Open it," Jerome called out. Dean turned around, looking up the steps. The scholar sat in the wheelchair looking down at him. "Then get up here."

Shrugging to himself, Dean drew out the key and pushed at the door. It opened easily, soundless on greased and balanced hinges. He felt his eyes widen slightly as he took in the thickness of it as the edge was revealed, and the geared locks that controlled the huge tenon bars lining the back of it. Inside, he couldn't see anything, the blackness complete.

"Come on," Jerome said impatiently, fingers tapping against the arms of his chair.

Dean walked up the steps and grabbed the handles of the chair, tipping it and easing it down.

"To the left," Jerome said as they reached the doorway. "There's a fuse box and the power switches for the generators."

Dean pulled out his flashlight and turned it on, handing it to Ackers as he pushed the chair inside. The beam showed a wide gallery, a delicately patterned wrought iron balustrade following the curving edge. He could see the box on the wall ahead.

He opened the door to the box and saw two old-fashioned switches, both set down. "Both of them?"

"Yes," Jerome said, keeping the light on the box. Dean pushed up the first one and a deep hum filled the room, a faint vibration running through the floor under his feet. He pushed up the second one as the lights came on, illuminating a much bigger space than he'd imagined.

"Here," Jerome said, flicking off the flashlight and handing it back to him, then turning the chair and continuing along the gallery to a small, caged elevator. Dean watched him open the metal gates and push himself in, turning to look the other way along the gallery.

A curving staircase followed the round wall down to the room below and he closed the box door, and walked slowly toward it, looking around as he went.

It was enormous, the ceiling with its long suspended light fittings shadowy and more than fifteen feet above him. Below, an oval-shaped room was almost sixty feet long, forty feet maybe at the widest point. One side held electronics, a massed bank of computers, telecommunication equipment, racks and shelves of printers, data drives, the LEDs on them coming on and blinking, monitors along a gently curving timber counter jumping to life, showing the same unicursal six-pointed star rotating against the black screens. On the other side of the room, the small elevator whirred and hummed and he watched Jerome open the cage door and wheel himself out when it stopped.

"How long since you've been here?" he asked, looking down at a table that sat in the middle of the floor, lights coming on under the translucent top, illuminating a map of the world that seemed to be projected onto the surface from beneath.

"Four years now," Ackers replied, pushing himself to the comms centre and moving a mouse to bring up the locked screen. His fingers flew over the keys, entering the required login and password and the screen cleared, showing a number of program shortcuts on a black desktop. He clicked on one and the screen faded to white, a map of the world, identical to the one on the table behind him, drawn over it. Six points on the map were flashing, and Jerome type in a command, turning the chair to the table as the map there was updated.

"What's that?" Dean stopped by the table, looking at the flashing locations.

"Order buildings that are active," Jerome said, staring at the map. Dean leaned closer to the surface of the table. The locations were scattered. One was in a small group of islands to the north of Scotland. A second in the Pyrenees Mountains, on the border of France. A third flashed in what seemed to be the middle of Australia. The fourth was in Lebanon, Kansas. There was a fifth on the border of China and Tibet. And the sixth was on a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

"All a long way from here," he commented, glancing up at Ackers. Jerome nodded absently, turning the chair back to the comm counter and typing in a new set of commands.

Beyond the situation room, four wide, shallow steps and a long gently sloping ramp led up to the next room. Dean walked up the steps, looking around at the floor-to-ceiling shelving that lined every wall and filled half of the centre of the room. The shelves were packed with books, scrolls, manuscripts, papers and journals, a library ladder, fixed to three rails along the shelving and its base on wheels, against one shelf, reaching up to the upper shelves, twenty feet above the floor. The room exuded the smell of old paper gently. Four long, narrow tables, polished and empty filled the broad centre aisle, chairs placed around them. The room itself was around a hundred feet long, he thought, looking down to its end, perhaps sixty feet wide. Overhead lights shone on the tables, and sconces along the bookshelves provided additional light for the shelving. The floor was polished hardwood, softened by large oriental rugs, their jewel-colours glowing under the lights.

He walked to one side of the library tables, glancing left and right. In the middle of the room, on the right-hand side, a huge hearth sat cold and clean, armchairs and low occasional tables flanking it. Here and there, placed in gaps between the solid stacks perpendicular to the built-in shelving, glass cases gleamed at him, each holding some rare book or scroll or script and adjustable light and magnifying glass screwed on to one side.

When he reached the other end of the room, he saw identical, panelled doors, leading out to either side. He turned left, to the nearest, hand dropping onto the ornate knob and the door opening easily to a long, wide hall, also lined floor-to-ceiling with shelves, and also packed full of books and texts. Along the hall, more doorways punctuated the run of shelving and he stopped and opened the first one, stepping into a large, comfortable room. A large desk, covered by a green leather blotter took up most of the left-hand wall. On the opposite side, a hearth, smaller than the library's was surrounded by a plush sofa and a couple of armchairs. Old-fashioned glass-shaded lamps sat on the small tables and to either side of the fireplace, floor-to-ceiling, glass-fronted bookshelves took up the embrasures. The wall directly opposite the door held filing cabinets and card drawers, closest to the desk, and built-in shelves along the rest. No window, he thought, his gaze travelling around the room. High on the walls were wrought-iron vents, their design sinuously familiar, the Enochian warding symbols Cas had shown him to protect against demons – and against angels. He felt his brows rise at the sight. Perhaps Ackers' society did know what they were doing.

Leaving the door open, he backed out, and kept walking down the corridor, coming to a staircase at the end. The flights of stairs went up and down and he wondered how big the place actually was. To the left and just before the stairs a pair of glass-paned doors stood open, and he walked in, crossing a large dining room. In the centre, the huge table was surrounded by a dozen comfortable-looking chairs, against the walls, sideboards held trays of glasses, crystal and glass decanters, bowls of flowers long since dead and dried out.

At the other side of the room, another door stood open and he passed through into a long narrow room. Here, the walls held floor-to-ceiling cupboards, walls and cupboards painted in the same shade of cream. The cupboards above waist-height were glass-fronted and he could see plates and bowls, saucers, and every kind of chinaware through the dust-covered glass. Beneath, the cupboards were wider, drawers set into them just below the counter, solid cupboard doors beneath them. He pulled open the nearest drawer, looking at serried ranks of silver cutlery. The next one along held serving implements. The cupboards beneath were stacked with platters and glasses of every conceivable shape and size.

Looking back at the cutlery drawer, he pulled out a knife. In the silver handle, the order's symbol, the Aquarian Star, had been engraved and polished. He dropped it back in the drawer and saw that the fine, white china filling the cupboard closest to him was also patterned with the order's symbol, glazed in silver around the rims of the large dining plates. It was like a castle, or – or a hotel, he thought, brows drawing together in a frown. No expense spared, either.

On the other side of the butler's pantry, another door opened into a commercial-sized kitchen. Dean wandered into the massive room, his gaze moving incrementally over everything he could see. Long ranges lined one wall, counters and sinks took up the length of another, a big, scrubbed pine preparation table sat in the middle.

Standing in the room, Dean turned around slowly, seeing the other doors, pantries, maybe, or store rooms. He thought of the staircases, going both up and down and shook his head slightly. How big was this place?

Turning back to the dining room, he walked out, retracing his steps back to the library and the situation room. Jerome was still sitting there, black brows drawn together in frustration as he typed commands into the computer.

"How big is this place?" Dean asked, stopping behind him.

"Big," Jerome said shortly. "There are two floors above us, and another six below."

Dean's brows shot upward. "And it's all filled with books?"

"Books, artefacts, weapons, esoteric ingredients … yes. The library extends down to the first sub-basement," Jerome confirmed, swearing softly under his breath as another command was rejected by the computer and he typed in a new one. "The armoury, the apothecary and the store rooms take up the rest of the space. Upstairs there are twelve bedrooms, four bathrooms … the entire top floor is where the oldest texts are kept."

"Uh … what are you doing?" Dean looked at him, noting the increasing frustration in the man's face.

"Trying to find a satellite that is not dependent on its ground station to hack into so that I can communicate with the other active chapters," Jerome snapped. "Go and have a look around, I might be hours here."

Dean shrugged, turning away.

"Check the pantries. I got rid of all the fresh food when I closed it down, but there'll be plenty of canned and preserved foods, and we need to eat," Ackers added tersely.

Later, Dean thought, going back up to the library and taking the right hand door. It opened into a mirror image of the corridor on the other side of the library, wide and lined with shelves, doorways at regular intervals. He checked the first couple, finding more private offices. At the end of the corridor, another set of stairs led up and down, and before the staircase, a door opened into a series of interconnecting rooms that held the biggest collection of weapons he'd ever seen.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

_Alex moaned softly as she recognised the marble room, closing her eyes and turning away from the centre. She didn't want to be here, seeing the things that the devil was doing._

_A scream filled her ears, deep and raw, echoing from the hard cold floors, from the stone walls and fluted columns and she ran between the outer wall and the columns blindly, stopping as the room seemed to twist and flex around her, and she found herself standing in the middle, facing the tall man and the circle of blood. Above it, Dean was suspended in the air, rotating slowly, his arms and legs hanging down, head thrown back. She had no doubt that the scream had come from him, watching his blood dripping onto the floor beneath, the gaping wounds so deep she could see the bones through them._

_The sword still lay to one side of the circle, and the tall man glanced at it. Alex watched it rise up on its own, spiralling around until the point rested against Dean's torso. She tried to close her eyes as it pushed slowly into him, but they were held open by the same force that had dumped her here, in the middle of this ongoing nightmare._

_She shifted her gaze instead to the tall man on the other side of the circle. His suit was still bloodied, the shades of red darkening as the blood dried. He was watching Dean and the sword, a small smile playing over his mouth as the blade slipped deeper and Dean began to shake helplessly. Then his eyes cut to her._

_Again, she felt the cold curiosity probing at her, the air gone from her lungs as she stared back. She watched his eyes narrow and his mouth open and inside she wanted to scream, to run. And something changed. She could breathe again, the rasp of the air dragged into her throat loud in the deep silence. Dean had stopped moving, the sword motionless. Nothing else moved. Except the man watching her._

"_Can you see me?" he asked her, his voice disbelieving._

_She backed away nervously, and he lifted a hand, almost imploringly._

"_Wait!" he called out. "Please – wait."_

_His face was different, she registered suddenly. No longer cold, filled with satisfaction at the agony he was inflicting. He looked younger. The hazel eyes were stricken, filled with pain and a desperation she could almost feel radiating from him._

"_Please. Can you see _me_?"_

_She nodded slightly, wondering at the emphasis._

"_You have to help me," he said, his voice cracking as he stared at her. "You have to help me save my brother."_

_Alex stopped moving, her gaze cutting involuntarily to Dean's body, held in stasis above the circle._

"ALEX."

_The voice was loud, penetrating and the man and the hall and the circle dimmed suddenly. _

_The tall man nodded rapidly. "Please, you have to find him, tell him –"_

"ALEX, WAKE UP."

_The man was gone, lost in a cloud of darkness that swept her up, filling the huge marble hall and carrying her away._

The dream dissolved and Alex woke up, disoriented in the small bedroom of the house she was sharing, Renee holding her shoulder.

"Sorry, hon, it's Ben," Renee said, and Alex nodded absently, pushing back the covers and getting out of the bed, dragging on jeans and a jumper.

"What's wrong?" she asked, following Renee out of the room.

"I don't know, he's in the main house. I think he had a nightmare but he's asking for you."

Pulling on the boots that she'd left beside the front door, Alex shut the door behind her and hurried across the gravel road, climbing the steps beside Renee. Fragments of her own dream were ricocheting around her head, and she pushed them aside when she saw the boy, huddled in the corner of the long sofa, his face wet with tears and the thin shoulders shaking.

She picked up the blanket lying on the back of the sofa and wrapped it around him, pulling him close and rocking him gently as he tucked his face into her shoulder and started to cry.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Dean waved his fork in the direction of the situation room as he swallowed the mouthful of stew. "Got SSB in there?"

Jerome nodded. "Everything we could think of."

"I'll see if I can reach Bobby later." He scooped another mouthful onto the fork. "If you can find a satellite, can we use it to communicate from here to Michigan?"

"Theoretically? Yes," Jerome said, wiping his mouth on the fine linen napkin protecting his shirt front. "Once I have a section of free signal, we can communicate with anyone who can pick up the satellite, but with only one satellite and no relay stations, we'll be limited to one hemisphere and constrained by the local weather."

"So, you guys were more or less expecting the end of the world?" Dean asked, gesturing vaguely around the room.

"Hoping it wouldn't happen, of course," Jerome sighed. "But yes, preparing for it."

"Why'd you leave here, go to New York? Wouldn't you have been safer here?"

"I left because I was still in touch with other members of this chapter then," the scholar said, looking down at the remains of the stew in his bowl and pushing it away. "We'd planned to escape together, come here and set up a command centre, make sure we could stay in touch with all the others – the virus was released before we were ready." He shook his head. "And it spread far faster than we anticipated."

Dean used the last biscuit to mop the sauce from the bowl, leaving it clean. "What did you mean, when you told Bobby I was a … uh …a–?"

"Legacy," the scholar supplied. "We were – the members of the order that is – all legacies. It was passed from father to son, the secrets of the order, of what we do here. Did here." He frowned at the table top. "Your grandfather disappeared before he was initiated, but normally that wouldn't have mattered, your father would have been trained by the others when he turned thirteen. Unfortunately, there was only me left, and I had no idea, not for years. And I lost track of him." He looked around the dining room, shrugging slightly. "I didn't find him again until 1976."

Dean's attention sharpened abruptly. "You saw him? And didn't tell him then?"

"No, I came to Lawrence, and I stayed for two weeks, just watching him," Jerome said. "He was married, and he'd grown up with his mother and a step-father. From discreet enquiries, it seemed that Maeve had told people that Henry had run off, abandoned them, but John didn't seem to worry about it. He'd only been four at the time and he had a new father by the time he started school, and from all the accounts, the family seemed happy enough. I spoke to John several times, running into him coincidentally in various establishments that he frequented. We struck up a friendly enough acquaintanceship, and he was an open man, believing the best of everyone. He told he'd found his place in life, with his Mary and the business he'd bought into, and they'd just bought a house … I couldn't bring myself to disrupt that life. Not then."

"Not then? You saw him again later on?"

Jerome nodded. "By 1978, I'd found several other members. The French chapter was tracking a demon, more than a demon really, one of the Fallen, through the years. They reported to me that the demon had been in Lawrence in 1973 and may have had contact with Mary's family. There were no eye witness accounts, and the discreet conversations they'd had with Mary had been inconclusive, but both her parents and several other people had died in the fall of that year, when the demon had been there, and they insisted that I see John again and try and find out if there was such a contact."

Dean felt his stomach plummet. "And you found out that there was."

"Yes," Jerome said heavily. "John knew nothing about it, I saw that straight away. But your mother knew about it. She told me that she would take care of it, and that if I told John she would kill me."

Dean's mouth twisted into a wry smile. It sounded like his mother, the young, determined woman he'd met. "So you left?"

"Yes, but we watched your family, watched the town for demon signs. In 1983, there were a lot of demon signs, all around the country. After the first ones in California, I went back to Lawrence. I told John about the order, about his father, and I told him that he was born to be a legacy."

"You told him about the demon?"

"No," Jerome admitted, shaking his head. "I wanted to – I should have, but I thought we'd have time to help Mary when it came.

"So, what did you tell him?"

"Just about his heritage. He was suspicious at first, then, I think, excited," Jerome said thoughtfully, remembering back. "He told Mary and I believe she vetoed the idea. It caused difficulties between them, John moved out for several days, trying to work it out for himself, but he moved back and told me that he couldn't do it."

"When was that?" Dean asked, remembering the fights, the phone calls, the silences. Sammy had been a very young baby.

"In June, 1983," Jerome told him. "I was called away, but I had intended to return, well before November, to keep watch on them. The order took the demon very seriously indeed. But my return was delayed and by the time I got back, your father had left, taking you and your brother with him, leaving no clue as to where he'd gone."

Leaning back in the chair, Dean tipped his head back and closed his eyes. "And the house was gone, and my mother was dead."

"Yes." Jerome looked at him. "I'm sorry."

_We're all sorry_, Dean thought tiredly. They'd all failed, trying to change that moment in time, that node in the lines of destiny. It had played out and the paths had been set.

"So, the Winchesters," he said. "They've been a part of … uh … this for a long time?"

"Yes," Jerome said. "I could give you the short version, but I think it would be better for you to see for yourself."

Dean opened his eyes and straightened in the chair, looking at him. "See for myself?"

Jerome gestured to the doorway that led back to the library. "The second office on the right along the hall was your grandfather's," he told Dean. "Your family records are in there. All of them. We moved the Campbell histories in there after Henry disappeared."

Dean twisted around in the chair to look at the door. "You serious?"

Jerome's brows shot up mockingly. "Have I ever been not?"

"Good point," Dean allowed, pushing his chair back and getting to his feet. He looked down at the plates on the table and reached for them, stacking them to take to the kitchen. "Do you need anything else?"

"No, I have a lot to do." The scholar nodded at him and turned the chair around, heading for the hall. Dean watched him go then carried the plates to the kitchen, setting them in the sink and running hot water over them. Family histories. Both sides. The thought was … uncomfortable, he decided. Overwhelming and uncomfortable. He'd been the keeper of the history of his family … until now.

He turned off the water when the dishes were covered and walked back through the dining room to the hall, counting off the doors.

Opening the door of the second office on the right, he felt for the light switch on the wall, and clicked it on. The office was roomy, a big walnut desk facing the hearth on one side of the room, dark green leather blotter covering most of it, a comfortable leather-upholstered chair behind it. A small return held a computer and printer beside it. Two armchairs faced each other to either side of the fireplace, a small sideboard stood near the door, with a silver tray on the top, holding several decanters and a grouping of glasses, the contents of the decanters glowing gold and amber and deep red in the warm, golden light from the lamp beside the tray. The rest of the walls were lined with bookshelves, glass-fronted, holding books and leather-bound journals, notes and dozens of manuscripts, simply bound in card and string. A tall reading lamp stood behind one of the deep armchairs, casting a clear pool of gold over it.

_Nice_, he thought, going to the shelves and reading along the titles slowly. They weren't hard to find, a series of thick books, each spine stamped in gold lettering, the name Winchester and a set of dates following it. Pulling out the first one, he took it to the armchair and set them down on the small round table beside it, going to the sideboard and checking the contents of each of the decanters. The middle one held whiskey, the liquid a warm amber in the lamp light. He poured a couple of inches into a glass and carried it back to the chair, setting it beside the books and sitting down.

He picked up the first book, one brow lifting as he saw the date. Twelve-hundred, B.C. _Ancient history_, he thought, his nose wrinkling up slightly. He opened it and picked up the glass. The whiskey was top-shelf, sliding down his throat like silk. He swallowed another mouthful and began to read.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Rufus opened the door to Bobby's office, scowling when he saw the hunter wasn't there.

"Dammit," he said, opening the door wider and gesturing to Alex to go inside. "I'll go find him, just wait here."

"Rufus, I just want a rough estimate, you can give me that, can't you?" Alex walked past him into the office, turning around to look at him. "I don't need to bother anyone."

He looked at her sternly. "It's no bother, and I know he wanted to ask you about the harvesting arrangements for all the camps. Just wait, okay?"

"Okay," she said, looking around as he closed the door, boots clumping down the hallway.

She'd been in here a hundred times, but usually it had been full of people and there'd been things to discuss. It was a nice room, filled with the afternoon sunlight now, a homey-looking throw over the back of the sofa, books stacked and piled over the desk and floor haphazardly. At heart, she thought, Bobby was a scholar, his curiosity about things driving him to acquire knowledge, to search through clues and footnotes and archaic references to find the answers. She wondered if he knew that, or if the loss of the use of his legs had taken that from him as well.

On the shelving that lined three of the walls, books were lined up, more filling the gaps between the top of the spines and the top of the shelves, objects and the occasional photograph, some framed, some not, leaning against the rows. Walking over to the shelves, she started to read the titles, picking them out randomly as she moved slowly around the room. She picked up a framed photo, lifting it aside to read the titles behind it and putting it back. The subjects of the photo caught her eye and she looked at it more closely, picking it up again. A teenaged Dean, she realised belatedly, standing with an older dark-haired man, and a younger boy. In the corner, someone had noted on the edge that it was Dean, John and Sam, 1995. All three were grinning at the camera, leaning back against a black car, relaxed … happy.

Putting the photograph back on the shelf, she looked for others, moving faster along the shelves now. A colour photo, more recent, she thought, and unframed, showed an older Dean and the same boy from the other photograph, also older. She picked it up, and turned it over. _Dean and Sam Winchester, 2007_. Turning it back, Alex tilted it toward the light coming through the windows.

It was the tall man, she thought, her heart starting to hammer against her ribs, pounding in her ears. The same long thick hair. The same hazel eyes. Much younger, but definitely him. Sam Winchester. Dean's brother. Younger brother.

_You have to help me save my brother_. The man's voice – _Sam's voice_ – echoed softly in her mind.

Behind the door opened and she put the photograph back on the shelf, turning to face Bobby and Rufus as they came in.

"Alex, glad you could make it," Bobby said, wheeling himself around the desk. "We're running a recce up to Colorado, and I don't want to make too many plans, if we're going to need a lot of folks around for harvest."

"Uh …" Alex gathered her thoughts, forcing herself to think of what had been planned for the months to come. "Dave's got people for the crops. Marcus and Kelly have already started harvesting the other farms, and most of it can be stored in the silos that are on the farms," she told him, dragging back the details. "We'll have plenty of hay, even with the increase in livestock this year. It'll be the vegetables and fruit we'll need more for – not just harvesting, but preserving, pickling – all the grunt work."

Walking slowly to the table, she listened to Bobby and Rufus discussing the requirements for able-bodied help, her thoughts churning. What could she tell them? Really? That she was _dreaming_ about Dean's brother? As Lucifer? As … maybe … himself? Who'd believe it? She could hardly believe it herself.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Dean set down the second book, looking at the empty glass on the table then his watch. Two in the morning. He'd mainly skimmed the two books, slowing down for the parts that seemed significant, skipping over the day-to-day details of his long-ago ancestors. He'd noticed that the bulk of the histories held notations referring to the sources, and he'd wondered how the hell the order had gotten those. He got up and stretched, muscles stiff from sitting in one position too long.

Bobby might be still be up, he thought, remembering the decision to try the SSB to contact Chitaqua. The old man had said he wasn't sleeping much anymore. He picked up the glass and put it back on the sideboard, opening the door and walking down to the library. In the situation room, he could hear the clicking of keys, knew before he got there that Jerome was still up, working to find an uplink that he could use.

The history had been clear enough. But still unbelievable. Descended from angels. That was a new one on him. Not just the line that had eventually ended up as the Winchesters either. The Campbells as well. He couldn't work out how important that was.

Pushing the questions aside for the moment, he walked past the scholar and sat down at the table that held a half a dozen different types of radios. Switching on the big set, he waited for it to warm up a little, and picked up the mike, tuning it slowly to the frequency that Bobby was using to try and get in touch with other hunters, a frequency that wouldn't be used by anyone else. And hopefully not scanned for by their enemies. Radio was iffy that way. If Ackers could find a satellite they could encrypt their communications more efficiently.

The digital readout showed the frequency he wanted and he pressed the button on the mike, speaking clearly into it.

"CQT, CQT, this is Blackbird, repeat, this is Blackbird, do you read, over?"

The radio hummed quietly and he tried again. A soft crackle of static answered him the second time, then he heard Bobby's hoarse voice over the speaker, his mouth lifting at one corner.

"Blackbird, this is CQT, reading you, over."

"We're in Aladdin's cave, CQT, safe and sound, over."

"Good to hear, Blackbird. Found us any treasure yet? Over."

"The like of which you'll have to see to believe, CQT." Dean grinned at the set. "It'll take me awhile to get through this stuff and find what we need, but it's awesome, CQT – winning-the-lottery-awesome. Over."

"How long you gonna be there, Blackbird? Over."

"Not sure, maybe a week, maybe longer." Dean looked around at the doorway to the library. "Haven't even scratched the surface. Everything alright there? Over."

"Yeah, we're good, Blackbird. Nothing to worry about, over."

"I'll check in again when I've got a better idea of how long it's gonna take, CQT, over."

"Pretty good to be able to keep in touch, Blackbird. How 'bout a regular sked, so we know you and the Prof are still breathing? Over."

"Ten-four, CQT. We can do that. Same time? Over."

"Yeah, I'm up, Blackbird," Bobby said, the sourness coming clearly over the airwaves. "Anything you want to know about this end? Over."

Dean hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. "No, CQT. I'll check in tomorrow. Blackbird over and out."

"CQT over and out."

He sat looking at the set for a few minutes, then flipped off the switches, watching the readout and power light die away. It was damned good to be able to talk easily, the realisation sparking a bunch of new ideas for the place. Getting up, he walked over to Jerome.

"Any luck?"

"No." Ackers didn't look up, his gaze focussed on the screen. "Told you, this could take hours … or days."

"Right." Dean looked at him for a moment, wondering if he should ask about the things he'd been reading about. _Save it for later_, he thought, _read it first, then ask the questions_. He walked back up to the library and down the hall.

It would take him at least a week to find the books and everything that they could reasonably pack up and take to Michigan with them. And looking around at the sheer size of the place, he was already wondering if it wouldn't be better to bring Mohammed to the mountain rather than attempt to take the mountain to Michigan. There were vast resources here, needing to be discovered, to be mined for the information. Bringing Bobby here might not solve everything, but he had a feeling it would be a start. And they could work the order's secret hideout in shifts, maybe. There was enough room for a few people, along with Jerome and Bobby – probably Ellen too. She would look after them, make sure they ate, slept … it would leave Chitaqua without the two people most involved in the organisation, but perhaps … perhaps he could solve that too.

He walked into his grandfather's office, chewing on the corner of his lip, thoughts racing through his mind as he poured another couple of inches from the decanter into the glass. He carried it over to the table beside the chair and returned to the shelves, pulling out the last volume of the Winchester journals. 1983 –? To the present, he supposed, opening it as he sat down and started to read. Dawn had come and gone when the neatly typed text turned into a careful handwritten account.

* * *

He closed the book slowly. The last entries had been in Jerome's neat and precise hand, he thought. They finished in 2009. There was a bit of updating to do, he realised, wondering vaguely if the scholar would get around to that too. He picked up his glass and swallowed the last mouthful of whiskey, closing his eyes and letting the information he'd just absorbed spread out in his mind.

It'd all been preset, from the very beginning. They'd never had a chance of changing the outcomes of anything. He wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad one. Most of it he'd known, had been told, had lived through. Reading about it, the speculations on events the order hadn't been privy to, the things they'd known for sure, had been a curious experience, giving him a disorienting sense of living twice, making his memories more unclear, if that were possible.

After the fire, the order had lost John for twenty years. They'd caught glimpses of him, but his father's paranoia about the demon – the fallen angel, Azazel – tracking them had meant that he'd been ultra careful about leaving a trail. Jerome had used other hunters to pass on information that he'd hoped would get to John, most of them never knowing that they'd been used as messengers, or informants. But by 1996, John had cut himself from the hunting community, and had been moving his family around almost constantly. Ackers had managed to track him down in '05 finally. And had told him everything they'd known or been able to piece together. And it had been then, after that meeting, that John had disappeared and refused to be found, Dean realised.

And the scholars had only found about the breaking of the seals to Lucifer's cage, after he'd made his deal, despite their knowledge of the prophecy, of the keys that Heaven had gone to such fucking trouble to create.

Two steps behind and batting none for a thousand, he thought bitterly. He finished the whiskey and looked down at the book. If they had found him before, had told him that he would break the first seal, down in the pit, would it have made any difference, he wondered? He would've stayed on the rack, he hoped. Would've endured the agonies knowing more was at stake than himself. But he still would've made the deal, he knew. That detail would never have changed.

By the time he'd been raised, they'd lost them again, he and Sam moving so fast around the country, trying to avoid the angels and demons on their asses, that no one had been able to find them in time to warn them about Sam, about Lilith, about the last seal. Had that been destiny's hand? Keeping them out of reach of the people who'd known for sure what was going to happen? Possibly. Destiny had reached out and played with them all their lives, and nothing, it seemed, had been able to change it.

The lines of Azazel and Araquiel. Campbells and Winchesters. The men destined to break the seals and destined to become the vessels of Lucifer and Michael, to face each other in the battle of Armageddon. It would have been a good movie plot, he thought. He'd have gone to see it. Loads of special effects, good versus evil. Black and white. It was a shame that real life hadn't been even remotely like that.

He thought about what Ackers had said about free will. There was always a chance to change the details. To not follow the path laid in front of them. Sam already had said yes to Lucifer. He didn't know why. And the order didn't know why either. Had the Prince of Lies been smooth and sympathetic and tricked his brother into believing it would all come out alright if he just gave in? Like Ruby had? He rubbed a hand tiredly over his face. He didn't know. And it would drive him crazy to imagine the scenarios.

He had a lot of work to do here, and he needed to get started. Putting the journals back on the shelves, he wondered if he could manage to get a couple of hours sleep before morning. A glance at his watch told him it was already morning, well into morning. Exhaling, he shut off the lights and closed the door behind him as he walked out of the office, heading for the library again.

* * *

It took almost three weeks to get the books they needed sorted out and packed into the car. He'd taken several weapons from the armoury as well, two more Kurdish knifes, the blades and engravings identical to the one Ruby had given them, and a bright, short angel sword, quatrefoil pointed, made of a metal he couldn't identify, but razor-sharp along the edges. He'd also packed two small crates of books and ingredients from the apothecary, pretty much randomly, hoping Bobby would be able to make sense of them. He'd been thinking of ways to get a team in here, to study and go through the vast store of knowledge – Bobby and Ellen, Chuck perhaps, Jerome and possibly whoever he thought might be able to be trained as legacies. Every trip here would be a risk, he knew, and sooner or later the demons in the state would get suspicious about the traffic, but he hoped they could stay under the demon radar long enough to gain what they needed. And Bobby would be able to handle the order's wheelchair friendly place as well as Jerome had.

"I could stay here, keep trying to get the satellite uplink," Jerome said mulishly as Dean waited for him.

"I don't know when we can run in the next lot of volunteers," Dean countered. "We'll come back, Jerome. Guaranteed. But we'll do it with supplies and people, enough to make a real difference."

Jerome stared at the screen for a long moment, then huffed and shut it down. "We could use this place, you know."

"I know," Dean agreed readily, watching him head for the elevator and turning for the stairs.

They could and they would. And when they hit Boulder, it would be with real firepower at their disposal, a snatch and grab that would make Wichita look like a kid's game. But they'd do it smart, with as much thought and preparation as it needed to keep the people who came here safe.

Opening the door, he looked out from the inside to a set of concrete steps, and beyond them to an ordinary blacktop road with thin, straggling woods to either side. When Jerome had wheeled himself to the bottom of the stairs and Dean had closed the door, the illusions dropped back in place, thick woods and the damp smell of decay, mists swirling through the tree trunks, hiding the details of everything. Dean put the key into the box and watched it close itself up neatly, and tucked the box into the inside pocket of his coat, heaving the wheelchair up the stairs and walking straight, his eyes half-closed to where he knew the car was.

_Illusions_. _Huh_.

* * *

_**CR 50, Nebraska**_

"Didn't it occur to you guys that we spent a lot of time at Bobby's?" Dean asked irritably, his thoughts circling around all the missed chances the journals had shown.

"Bobby Singer was a wild card," Jerome explained patiently. "Most of the hunting community has a lineage, sometimes a known one, sometimes not. Every now and again, people who have no traceable line to one of the Qaddiysh do begin to hunt. Ninety-seven percent of them die in the first year. Bobby turned out to be the exception that proves the rule, but at that time we knew nothing about him, other than he'd started hunting when his wife was possessed by a demon. We didn't know if we could trust him with information like that and we certainly didn't have anyone to spare to sit in Sioux Falls and watch his house waiting for you to show up. There aren't that many of us."

Dean scowled at the pleasant country road ahead of him. "Sam and me, we were just pawns, weren't we?"

"Yes," Jerome said bluntly. "And you still are. Michael is still looking for you, I presume, despite having resurrected Adam."

"How is it that you didn't know about Adam again?"

"I believe your father kept him a secret from you too?" Jerome retorted sardonically. "We are not omnipotent, Dean. And your father was an expert in keeping secrets."

_He had that right_, Dean thought bitterly. Would that kid have been able to knife his brother in the back if his father had been around? It was a question that had no answer and was better not to think about in any case.

"Nothing in this world or any other, for that matter, is pure, Dean. No pure good. No pure evil. There are no absolutes. Everything, and I mean everything, is a mixture, leaning a little more this way or a little more that. Humans. Angels. Demons. God. We were all born innocent. Perfect. And life has etched and weighed and drawn upon us the experiences that shade us into mostly good or mostly evil or any one of the billion hues in between. But even Lucifer is not pure evil. He was an angel once."

Dean was silent, watching the road and Jerome looked across at him. "What happened to you, what you did, what you felt … that has not changed who you are. It has only changed how you see yourself."

He saw the younger man tense up, knuckles whitening the skin as his fingers gripped the wheel.

"You don't know that," Dean said softly.

"I do know it," Jerome said, his voice filled with certainty. "You were raised. Had you become irretrievably evil, that would not have happened. And there's some part of you that knows that as well."

Silence stretched out in the car, underlain by the thrum of the tyres over the asphalt, by the deep roar of the engine. Jerome sighed, turning to look out the window as the fields and woods and small buildings flashed by. He couldn't make the hunter see, could only offer the same clues he'd had and hope that Dean would, some day, follow them and come to the same conclusions.

Dean reached out and pushed in the tape in the stereo, twisting the volume knob enough to the right to drown out his thoughts, and hopefully aggravate the man riding shotgun beside him. They had another few hundred miles to go, and his foot pressed down hard on the accelerator, wanting those miles to go as fast as possible.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

"Where is everyone?" Dean asked Ellen as she met him at the front door, opening it wide for him to pass through, his arms laden with the first two boxes of books.

"Up at Tawas," she told him. "Last of the harvest was brought in today and we're celebrating."

"How come you're not over there then?" He dropped the boxes on the hall floor and turned around to get the next load.

"Someone had to watch the home fires," she said lightly. "I'll get some help, go and talk to Bobby, he's been champin' at the bit, waitin' for you."

Dean turned and picked up the boxes again, carrying them down the hall to Bobby's office. He wasn't sure where they'd go, but the office was the best bet, despite its overflowing shelves. Pushing open the door with his elbow, he walked in and put the boxes down by the desk.

"First lot of reading for you," he said, looking at the man behind the desk. Bobby smiled tiredly and waved a hand at the chair opposite, pushing a glass toward Dean.

"I was thinking that we need to get a team over to the order's place, Bobby," Dean continued, dropping into the chair and picking up the glass. "You and Ellen for sure, maybe Chuck, Jerome and whoever he thinks might make good researchers."

"You want me out of here, Dean?"

"No," Dean said uncomfortably. "You've got to see this place, Bobby. And there's too much for just a couple of people to be able to go through, it needs people who know what they're looking for … know what they're looking at, a few of them at least."

"We'll see," the older man said, nodding. "You should get up to Tawas, see everybody, kick back a little."

Dean shrugged. "In a while. How have things been here?"

"Pretty ordinary," Bobby said, sounding faintly surprised. "Mostly I was worried about you."

They both turned around to see Ellen, followed by Chuck and Will, carrying in boxes of books and stacking them along the walls.

"Much more?" Bobby asked, looking at them.

"Car's full," Ellen said, with a slight smile. "Keep you going till Christmas."

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

It was just after midnight when Dean pulled in through the gate of Tawas, lifting a hand to Duncan and Michael who had gate duty, and driving up to the main building. He could hear music, see the strings of fairy lights someone had found in town, strung up around the building and entwined around the porch rails. He parked the car and walked up the steps, going in through the open front door and making his way through the crowded hall. The rooms were full of people, talking, laughing, eating and drinking, the tables set out along the walls still loaded with food.

He saw Boze, dancing with Renee in the centre of what looked a hundred other couples, and nodded when he caught the older man's eye. Looking around, he saw Rufus, deep in conversation with Maurice and Emmett, by the far window. He turned around and wandered back through the crowd, feeling a prickling discomfort at the sheer numbers of the people surrounding him after three weeks spent mostly alone. Going out the side door, he stopped at the railing of the porch, dragging in a deep breath of the cool night air.

He could hear a low murmur of conversations and he walked around the corner of the building. Along the wider section of porch, overlooking the kitchen and herb gardens at the rear of the house, a number of small tables had been set up and people were sitting there, talking quietly. He almost missed her, sitting alone at a table on the edge of the pools of light, her profile in shadow and outlined by the lights behind her. Hadn't realised he'd been looking for her, until he saw her there. He started walking toward the table, then slowed down as he tried to think of something to say that would get him past the last conversation they'd had.

Dave Patterson came out of the double French doors to the house, the lights shining off thick, wheat-blond hair as he looked around the tables, his face creasing up in a warm smile when he saw Alex.

Watching him walk confidently over to the table, Dean stopped. The last time he'd seen the farmer, it'd seemed pretty clear that he'd struck out. But, he reminded himself uncertainly, that'd been then. He watched as Dave stood by the table, holding his hand out to Alex, his gaze shooting toward the dancers inside. Alex followed the look and shook her head, and Dave leaned closer, his hand closing around hers. She got up reluctantly, taking a couple of steps before stopping again, shrugging slightly as she looked up at him.

They were little more than silhouettes against the lights of the house behind them, and Dean saw him take a step closer to her, head inclining forward as he kissed her, one arm curling around her waist to draw her against him.

Turning around abruptly, he walked back down the length of the porch and around the corner, going into the house through the side door, driven by an uncomfortable mix of disappointment and anger that he couldn't get a handle on. _So, she'd changed her mind about the guy, _it didn't mean anything to him, he thought, surprised at the slightly bitter edge he could feel. Chances were, she wouldn't have talked to him anyway, he decided, striding through the crowd back to the big living room. He didn't know how she'd've reacted, but it would've been awkward to try and talk to her … about – about his thoughts on the library and the team and reorganising Chitaqua's roster in the middle of … that. That's all it was, he told himself, looking around the room.

He saw Rufus lift his hand in greeting, and headed for him, accepting the glass of whiskey the hunter produced with a nod as he dropped into the armchair beside him, and tossing the contents back without thinking about it.

Rufus looked at him for a moment as he held the glass out for a refill, and tipped some more in, not quite as much this time, watching as Dean knocked it back again.

"Rough day at the office?" the older hunter asked, the half-smile not reaching his eyes.

"Long drive through demon-infested roads," Dean told him, forcing himself to sound casual, taking the bottle from him and refilling his glass. "What do you care?"

Rufus shook his head and shrugged. He'd known the younger man long enough to know when Dean was repressing something. Dean's gaze cut past him, and he turned his head a little, seeing Dave Patterson walk into the room through the open double doors. Looking back at Dean, Rufus wondered what the hell was so interesting about the farmer that Dean was still watching the doorway.

"You okay?"

"I'm … fine," Dean said, his gaze shifting back, clinking his glass against Rufus'. "So, enough food to feed everyone till spring?"

"Looks like, we'll be collecting the late stuff till the frost, but it's lookin' good," Rufus agreed cautiously. "When do you want to go and see Boulder? Bobby's been working out who we can take. We took a look from a distance while you were taking your holiday, but we won't have that much time before the passes close for the recce and the job."

"We'll handle the recce in a couple of days," Dean said abruptly. "You, me, Cas."

"That's thin."

"Boulder's not that big," Dean said, abruptly getting to his feet. He didn't want to sit here and drink, not even with Rufus. "See you tomorrow."

"Sure." Rufus shook his head slightly as he watched him walk across the room toward the hall. Something had happened with the man.

* * *

Dean walked fast across the room. Drive? Run around the lake? Look for some demons to kill? What the fuck was he thinking of doing?

"You heading back to Chitaqua?" Jo materialised out of the crowd as he turned into the hall, dropping into step beside him.

"Yeah, need a lift?"

"Sure do."

They walked down the stairs and got into the black car, Dean turning the key and the engine rumbling into life. The restlessness he couldn't decipher hadn't gone with the whiskey. He felt it fizzing in his blood as he put the car into gear and eased her onto the gravel road that led back to the gate. He wanted something to sublimate it, something else to think of, to feel.

"How was Kansas?" Jo asked, crossing her legs in the well under the dash.

"Interesting," Dean finally decided was the word he wanted. It covered a lot of ground. "Why? You miss me?"

It'd come out on its own, without thinking about it. He didn't look at her, just waited to see if that casual opening had been noticed.

"I might've," Jo said, looking at him thoughtfully.

He wondered what the hell he was doing, going down this path, then shoved the thought aside. Consenting adults. Free will. All of the above. And Jo wouldn't remind him of anyone else.


	13. Chapter 13 In the Service of God

**Chapter 13 In the Service of God**

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan. **_

Alex walked away from the tables and around the corner of the porch, stopping to lean against the rail and column, her head throbbing. Dave was a sweet man, a nice man, and she liked him. She'd liked being kissed by him. She wasn't sure why it was so easy to keep turning him down.

_You can lie to anyone else, but don't lie to yourself_. She didn't want to tell anyone, and that was the bottom line. Not much point pretending to be something she wasn't, and she didn't want to share who she was. _Impasse_. She walked along the porch toward the front of the house slowly, feeling the coolness in the air. Last of the harvest. End of summer. And it'd been almost two years now since she'd left Grand Rapids.

Coming around the front corner, her gaze dropped to the road and she stopped involuntarily at the sight of the black car parked out the front of the building. _Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, he had to walk into mine …_ she flinched inwardly as the implications of that misquote filtered through. That wasn't how it was. It'd never been that way.

She hadn't seen him inside, and she wondered distractedly when he'd gotten back, how he'd gone with Jerome's fantastical library, if he'd found the answers he'd needed. Or, thinking about the dream and Sam's plea, if he'd found the wrong answers. The ones that would lead to his death. She shivered at the thought, her doubts rising again. Should she tell him – tell _someone_ what that dream Sam had said?

As if she'd conjured him with the thought, Dean walked out onto the porch in front of her and she took a small step toward him, stopping when she saw Jo hurry out after him and catch up at the top of the porch steps. Alex watched them walk down to the car, both getting in and the engine starting. Jo lived at Chitaqua, she told herself, as the car pulled away and idled down the road to the gate.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean stopped the car at the end of the drive closest to his cabin. He opened the door and got out, hearing the squeak and the clunk of the passenger door opening and closing without looking around to see if Jo was following as he walked down the path. He didn't want to think about what he was doing too much.

"You're in a rush," Jo said as she caught on the steps of the cabin.

He glanced down at her, smiling slightly. Pushing open the door, he walked in and turned on the light, turning back to her and stepping close as she closed the door behind them. Looking down into her upturned face, he saw her lips part slightly as she looked back at him, and the sight unexpectedly cooled his desire. She looked young, and uncertain, and … well … it was Jo.

"Sure you want to do this?" he asked quietly.

"No," Jo said, a little breathlessly. "Are you?"

He was sure that he wanted someone to lose himself in. Someone who could wipe out his thoughts and feelings and leave him satiated and empty and tired enough to sleep without dreaming. Someone who wouldn't look at him with expectations in the morning. Looking down at her face, he knew full well she wasn't that someone, no matter how much he wanted to kid himself that she could be.

He straightened a little, and Jo saw the desire disappear from his eyes at the same time.

"No," he said, stepping back. "Sorry. This would be a mistake that neither of us wants to make, Jo."

Looking down, Jo exhaled sharply, folding her arms across her chest. "Well, thank you for making that decision for me."

"C'mon, you gonna tell me you're okay with a one-nighter?" he said mockingly, feeling the anger fizz up again.

She blinked at the tone. "That – that's – that's still my call, isn't it? If I want that or not?"

He looked at her, his eyes narrowing a little. "Okay, sure, it's your call. But let's get it clear – this isn't an invitation to anything other than now, tonight. Back to business as usual when the sun comes up."

She looked away. "And you're sure of that?"

He snorted, his voice hardening. "Yeah, I'm sure of that."

"Fine." She looked down, knowing he'd trapped her. Knowing that no matter which way she went, it would be her decision and she would have to wear the consequences. And the possibility, the possibility that she'd followed him here for … that was gone anyway.

She reached behind her for the door knob, twisting it and pulling the door open. "Thanks for the ride," she said coldly over her shoulder, walking out onto the porch and down the steps, leaving the door open behind her.

Dean watched her go. _Douche of the Year award coming your way_, he thought sourly, stepping forward and closing the door quietly when she walked out of sight. He flipped off the lights, walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling off his boots and letting himself fall back without bothering with the rest of his clothes. The sharp desire he'd had, on the ride down from Tawas, had gone, leaving an ache and an emptiness inside of him that he ignored.

Fucking around with Jo would have been a colossal mistake, he knew. For so many reasons he couldn't even list them all now. He'd had a few fleeting fantasies about her, about them, but they'd never lasted for long and, if he was honest with himself, they hadn't raised much of a sweat when they'd been around. She was a good hunter, a good pool player, easy on the eye and that was about it. He cared about her more because she was Ellen's daughter, and because he still thought of her as being a kid, than he did as herself, or as a woman.

And now there was another one who wouldn't talk to him, he thought, closing his eyes and rolling onto his side in frustration. The image that filled his mind bit sharply at him and he shoved it away, not wanting to think about it, or about anything in fact. After driving pretty much non-stop for two days, he just wanted sleep.

* * *

Dean looked down at the map spread over the table. It was a city map of Boulder and Bobby had marked it up from the recce team's observations.

"We can cut the power here," Bobby said, leaning over the other side of the table. "But I been reading through those books you brought back, and I think there's a winner in there." He turned around and picked up a slim leather-bound book from his desk. "It's old, round 400 AD, some priest was travelling through Syria and he found a man in the desert, way out in the desert. Guy told him he was a prophet."

"As in … a Chuck kind of prophet?" Dean asked, glancing around at the writer.

"Apparently," Bobby said, flipping through the pages. "Said he'd found the way to rid the world of demonkind."

Castiel sidled around the wheelchair, looking over Bobby's shoulder. "To close the Gates of Hell?"

"Wasn't that specific," Bobby muttered. "Here, it is. The prophet gave this priest one … recipe, I guess you'd call it, to get rid of a lot of demons fast. We need a few things that aren't going to be easy to come by."

"Such as?"

"Such as the skull of a calf of Egypt," Jerome interjected, looking over at them. "The tail of Franxius Necrovinia, a newt only found in Sri Lanka, and too many others for me to remember off the top of my head."

"You knew about this?" Dean asked accusingly.

"Yes, but we could never find all the ingredients so we could never make the … bombs, I suppose you'd call them, for lack of a better word." Jerome closed the book he'd been reading and set it down beside him.

Maggie smiled humourlessly at him. "I know where to find those things, no need for a passport."

"Where?"

"The Smithsonian," she said, a trace of smugness in her voice. "They have a huge store of natural history exhibits and four times as many things in their store rooms that aren't exhibited. I needed the spleen of an echidna for one spell. They had it."

"That's still in DC, my dear," Jerome said acidly. "You wouldn't be back until spring now."

"It's a two-day drive," Maggie said, her tone waspish in response. "And I can be back by the end of the week, if I can take Maurice?" She turned to look at Dean.

Dean turned around and looked at Maurice, who shrugged. "Sure. Bobby, give her the list. What's on there that doesn't come under natural history?"

"The rest of the ingredients we've got," Bobby said, scanning the list. "You brought a few of them from Kansas, the rest are herbs we've got growing."

"Good," Dean said, flicking a glance at Jerome. The scholar stared back blandly. "Demon bombs, I like it. What do they do?"

"According to this, they kill the demons, in or out of meatsuits. Vaporise the essence, it says."

"Even better." He nodded thoughtfully. "Rufus, Cas and me'll take a look at Boulder and see how we can use them. We'll be back around the same time as Maggie, if she can stick to her timetable. And then we'll go in."

"What about drivers? You gonna pull them out by bus again?" Ellen turned to him.

"Yeah, we'll take the drivers and dump them on the outskirts, bring them in when we're mopping up," Dean said slowly. If they could take out the power and the bulk of the demon guards, leaving the free civilians to blunder around in the dark, they would have enough time to be more leisurely with the escape.

"But for now, you and Ellen, Chuck, Jerome – and who'd you want to take?" he asked the scholar.

"Two of the eldest children are ready to begin – Taylor and Frances – and there are six adults I believe will be good researchers, even if not legacy material," Jerome said, looking up at him. "They have the language skills we need and orderly minds."

Dean's mouth lifted at one corner. "Orderly minds, yeah, okay."

He turned back to Bobby. "You get to the library and see what you can find."

Ellen looked at him. "And who's going to run this place while you're gone and we're gone?"

"Franklin and Vincent'll handle the protection side of things," Dean said. "We ask Alex if she'll come back to take care of the rest."

"We ask?" Ellen looked at him. "You mean you want me to ask her."

He shrugged, turning away. "Yeah, I want you to ask her, Ellen."

"And if she says no?"

"Then we'll find someone else," he said impatiently.

* * *

Standing on the gate tower, Dean watched the four-wheel drive and the truck rumble over the gate tracks in the predawn grey light. Chuck was driving the car, with Ellen riding shotgun and Bobby and Jerome in the back. Felix, a one-time language professor from UCLA, was driving the truck, Taylor and Frances sitting behind him, Marlene and Danielle squeezed along the front seat next to him, both students who'd studied history or language at college, and Aaron, Ted and Oliver sitting in the back along with enough fresh and preserved supplies to last them a couple of months. They would stay in touch with Chitaqua and Tawas via the radio.

The books from the apothecary had provided a couple of extremely effective hex bag recipes. Both vehicles were packed with them, and everyone carried a personal one. It was the best they could do to keep attention off them. All the vehicles in every camp were now holding them as well, helping to keep the settlements low profile.

He climbed down the ladder when he saw the Impala's headlights coming up the drive, Rufus driving.

Alex had returned to the camp yesterday. He'd seen her go into the house with Ellen when he'd been talking to Franklin in the workshop, but hadn't seen or talked to her since, leaving it to Ellen to fill her in on the plans that had been made.

Rufus pulled up next to the gate and slid to the passenger seat as Dean walked around the car and got into the driver's side. They had a full day's drive to Boulder, would get there late in the night. He felt the crackle of the hex bag in his coat pocket and concentrated his attention on the route and the likely conditions. The clear fall weather had been holding but the closer they got to the mountains the less likely it was to stay that way.

Bumping over the gate track, he wondered briefly if Maggie and Maurice would be able to get everything they needed for the demon bombs. He'd read over the account of the priest and the prophet himself, feeling an incredible surge of hope when the priest had described taking out a roomful of hellspawn with one of them, the demons and their vessels gone, their shadows left, burned into the walls of the building. A few of those and they could just march into Atlanta and leave Lucifer without his army. He felt his fingers tightening around the leather grip on the wheel and forced himself to relax them. They weren't there yet.

"Southern route?" Rufus asked him as he pulled onto the twenty-three. Dean nodded.

"Yeah, don't want to draw attention to Bobby and Ellen."

* * *

_**Boulder, Colorado**_

Rufus looked at the houses as he turned down the quiet side street. They seemed empty. He stopped the car beside one that had a For Rent sign outside of it, the sign leaning drunkenly to one side, the paint almost worn through. Not likely to have bodies inside, he thought as he turned the engine off. In the passenger seat, Dean slept, head resting against the window.

_He stood in the bedroom of his cabin, looking at the woman who was standing by the window on the other side of the room. She was lit by the strong moonlight that came in through the glass and as he walked slowly toward her, he took in the feathery curls that were maple and gold in the sunlight, washed out to pewter and silver now, framing a heart-shaped face and tumbling over her shoulders. The moonlight painted the prominent cheekbones in silver, the hollows beneath them in shadow and as she turned to him, he saw large eyes, darker in the dim light, with long, thick lashes. His gaze dropped to her mouth, full lips slightly parted as she saw him … he felt as if he was seeing that face for the first time, seeing it with a breathless astonishment – at how beautiful she was, and how he could've failed to see it before._

_The long nightgown was made of some thin material that gleamed where the light touched and he felt his breath freeze in his lungs as his gaze seemed to move without conscious volition down her body, the silky gown pulled tight over full, high breasts, looser around the slender waist and taut again against curving hips. Long legs, smooth and shapely were visible through the translucence of the thin fabric, the moonlight behind it. _

_Heat coiled inside him, spreading out slowly, and he stopped in front of her as her hands touched his bare chest, fingertips running lightly over his skin to curve around his neck. He bent his head, eyelids dropping, the pounding of his heart in his ears as he felt her breath on his mouth, almost –_

"Dean, we're here."

The dream shattered and he opened his eyes, blinking at the interior of the car, at Rufus sitting behind the wheel.

"Right. Here," he said, straightening up in the seat and wiping at the trace of moisture he could feel at the corner of his mouth.

"Thought you'd want to crash until morning." Rufus gestured to the house.

"Okay." He rubbed his eyes, dragging his thoughts together as the still-vivid images lingered in his mind's eye.

Rufus got out and Dean pushed open his door, hearing the rear door close as he stretched the kinks out of his back and neck in the cold night air and looked at his watch.

"Got four hours, we'll go in on foot to look at the slave camps just before dawn," he told Rufus as they walked to the front door.

"Sounds like a plan."

* * *

Dean sat at the small table of the rental house the next afternoon, looking down at the map. Mel, Jo, Ty and Rona had done the preliminary look at the city. They'd done a good job, he thought, matching up the locations on the map to what they'd seen over the last two days.

It was October. Allowing Maggie and Maurice an extra week, they wouldn't be able to get up here until the last week of the month, he thought, at the earliest. Sable was finished, and Live, Matt and Terry had already cut foundations for the two new camps, Lake West, near the head of Lake Tawas, and South Farms, the furthest out of the camps, in the middle of a dozen farms between Tawas and Lake Huron.

Jo's estimate put the Boulder slave number at around twelve hundred. He'd seen them being loaded that morning, and he agreed. And Boulder had one thing that Wichita hadn't, that would make all the difference in getting those people out. He rubbed the heel of his hand over his jaw as he thought about the way he wanted to take advantage of that. It would keep the drivers for the buses well and truly out of the line of fire, and enable them to field a hell of a lot more buses.

"Well?" Rufus asked, leaning comfortably back in his chair.

Dean looked up at Cas, who was standing by the window and back to Rufus. "Yeah, last week of October, if everyone's back and we've got all we need."

"And if they didn't get all we need?" Cas asked, his voice deep and rough.

"Then we'll use the same tactics as Wichita," Dean said. "They'll be easier to pen up here, and it still doesn't have the risk factor that Kansas had."

The angel nodded, turning back to the window. Dean looked at him for a moment. Cas had been getting more and more taciturn as the days had gone by.

"What bug's up your ass, Cas?"

Castiel turned back from the window. "Michael has a vessel, Dean. The remaining Seals could be opened any day. We are running out of time."

"Since the beginning," Dean agreed readily. "So?"

"So, tactically speaking, these missions to rescue people who are not in danger of dying is a poor use of our time."

"They're slaves, Cas," Rufus said, stiffening in his chair, and turning around. "You want to just leave –"

Dean held up his hand and looked at the angel. "You got a plan for getting into Atlanta and taking on Lucifer, Cas? Let's hear it."

"No," Cas looked away. "But we should be reconnoitring Atlanta, not here."

"With the new hex bags, we'll be doing that, but even if we knew where every damned demon in Atlanta was, and had a way of taking them out that we're sure of, we still couldn't beat the weather. We're coming into a winter that looks like it'll be just as bad as last year's or worse," Dean said coldly. "And I'm not sending people out to die for no good reason."

"If we hadn't been here –"

"If we don't save the people we can, when we can, then we're no better than those people who're working for the devil of their own free wills, Cas."

"And if Michael faces Lucifer before we get to him? And they all die anyway?"

"Then at least they'll die free, not chained up in a demon factory," Rufus said quietly.

Dean got up, lifting the map from the table and folding it up. "Relax, Cas, Lucifer's not going to move against Michael until he's ready. And he wants to have the odds heavy in his favour before then. We got time."

The angel didn't answer, walking out past them to the car. Rufus stood up, looking after him.

"What set that off?"

Dean shrugged. "No clue."

He didn't know how human Cas was becoming, wasn't sure if the angel still felt his angelic worries or the more prosaic concerns of a man. He'd have to talk to him about it sometime, he thought reluctantly.

* * *

_**Porter's Mill, South Dakota**_

"Step on it, Dean," Rufus snapped, twisting around in the seat to watch the headlights through the rear window, all of them getting bigger as they got closer.

"How many?" Dean apexed the corner and felt the car lift high to the outside as he cut it as fine as he could.

"Counting five, no, six of them," Rufus said, his fingers gripping the seat as Cas slid across the back seat and crashed into the door, the curves of the road switchbacking up the side of the hill.

"Hold onto something, Cas," Rufus muttered as Dean took the next one tight again. Behind them the cars were dropping in speed, none of the demons driving will to risk going off the edge to make the corners at the same speed the black car was.

"We'll get a bit of ground on these corners, then there's a straight ahead," Dean said, more to himself than anyone else as he squeezed every last drop of speed and handling he could from the black car.

They hit the straight with nearly fifty yards between them and their pursuers, and the car leapt ahead as Dean floored it, his headlights lighting up the rise ahead. Coming over the top, nearly seventy yards ahead now, he braked, throwing Rufus and Cas against the dash and the back of the seat respectively as a bank of spotlights hit them, the barricade stretched across the width of the road. Dragging the wheel hard to the left, Dean felt the car start to spin, gritting his teeth as he caught the movement and pulled out of it, the car skidding to a stop in front of the vehicles as the six cars and trucks came barrelling over the rise, tyres smoking and shrieking as they hit the brakes and came to a stop, the demons pouring out of the cars toward them

It wasn't until the hoses started that Dean realised that two of the vehicles blocking the road were fire trucks. He watched the water smoking and steaming as it hit the demon-possessed, saw four men, carrying firefighting backpack units, advance past the Impala and into the groups of demons, spraying the holy water under pressure from the packs strapped to their backs in continuous streams, the flesh of the meatsuits the demons were wearing bubbling and peeling off as they reeled around the open ground in panic and confusion. From the top of the fire truck in the centre of the road, a man stood, holding a megaphone as he recited a ritual for exorcism, his voice booming out over them.

"You know that one?" Dean frowned as he listened to the words and the demons smoked out of their meatsuits and disappeared into the night sky.

Rufus shook his head, head tilted to one side as he listened. "Never heard it before."

Castiel was also listening, a deep frown creasing his forehead. "It's … not one in use by the Church, or by Heaven," he added, looking at Dean.

They got out of the car as the last demon smoked away, leaving the dead meatsuit lying on the road.

"You boys alright?" One of the men carrying a sprayer walked up to them.

"Yeah, thanks," Dean said, looking at him. "Who're you?"

The man turned slightly as the others walked over. "We're the Sacrament Luther Militia," he said.

Dean looked at Rufus. "Militia?"

"That exorcism you used," Cas walked around the car to them. "Where did you learn it?"

The man looked at him for a moment, then back to his companions. "You knew that was an exorcism?"

Dean's mouth twisted up to one side. "You might say we're in the business of killing demons too."

An older man climbed down from the truck cab, walking over to them. "I'm Pastor Gideon, this is Rob Murray, Dylan Murray, Paul Kearney, Annalisa Romane." He held his hand out to Dean and Dean took it warily, relaxing a little as he felt the confidence in the strong grip.

"Dean Winchester," he said, gesturing to Rufus and the angel. "Rufus Turner, and uh, Cas … Plant."

"We've been under constant demon attack for the last two months," Pastor Gideon said in a low voice. "They seem to like us."

"Huh."

Pastor Gideon looked around. "Talking out here isn't smart. Will you come back to the town? I guess we could help each other."

Dean glanced at Rufus, who nodded. "Sure, we'll follow you."

The men turned away, climbing back into the trucks, and pickups, driving down the road. Dean, Rufus and Cas returned to the Impala, getting in and following them slowly.

"A whole town that wasn't hit by the virus?" Dean asked.

"Maybe," Cas said, looking at him through the mirror. "Maybe saved for something else."

"Oh, now there's a cheerful thought," Rufus said, looking around at him. "They seem to be doing alright with the demons."

"Why would demons attack a nothing town like this?" Dean stared at the taillights in front of him. "And now, why now? Everywhere else they've been gathering up slaves, moving people, killing people … but this town, they just attack?"

"It doesn't make sense," Cas nodded behind him. "Perhaps more will become clear when we arrive there."

Rufus rolled his eyes and slouched back in the seat. "Just for the record, I think this is a bad idea."

Dean watched the road. It didn't make sense and it was a bad idea. He felt it too. But those men, they hadn't been possessed and they hadn't been infected. So, if nothing else, they needed to find out what was going on.

* * *

The sun hadn't risen when they drove into the small town, but the sky had filled with light. He slowed down as they approached a wire link fence, high and topped with razor wire, roughly made platforms on either side of the barricaded road and a reinforced bus, by the look of it, sheet metal bolted over roof and windows down to the ground, acting as a gate. It rolled out of the way as the trucks drew close and he saw people on the makeshift towers to either side, holding fire hoses connected to portable thousand litre tanks, the nozzles pointing at the car. As the Impala cleared the gateway, the bus rumbled back across, and glancing in the side mirror, Dean saw that the bus was armoured completely, welded and bolted and strapped in steel sheets, narrow gun ports in between the panels.

Someone was thinking here, he realised, his gaze returning to the road ahead as he followed the fire trucks through the town. Every intersection had been painted over with devil's traps, every house and building was covered in the wards and sigils of protection, many from the Key of Solomon, others Cas said were Enochian.

Pulling up in front of the church, they got out, walking across the devil's trap painted on the stoop as the pastor and his team preceded them, and they followed them inside.

A young man in a white surplice stood in front of the altar, a bible in his hands as he spoke to the couple standing in front of him. Dean felt his brows rise as he realised what was going on.

"Wedding? Seriously?" Rufus muttered beside him. Standing with them, Paul Kearney smiled humourlessly.

"Yeah, we've had eight so far this week," he said dryly. Dean glanced at him.

"Not a believer in true love?" he asked him. Paul looked at him, his mouth lifting derisively.

"True love doesn't demand wedding vows before sex," Paul said in a low voice. "And marrying someone because you want to get laid but don't want to go to Hell? Not my thing."

The wedding vows were exchanged, along with the rings and the happy couple walked down the aisle past them. Pastor Gideon gestured to them to follow him, walking to the back of the church and into the sanctuary behind the altar. A young woman looked up as they came in, no more than seventeen, bright blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, pretty dark eyes in an oval face still soft and round with the remnants of childhood.

"This is my daughter, Leah," the pastor said, smiling at her. "Leah, this is –"

"Dean Winchester," she said, looking at him disbelievingly. "I – I've heard about you."

Dean stared at her. "You have?"

"The angels talk about you, they told me everything," she said, walking toward him. "You are Michael's vessel, the one who will save us."

Dean heard Rufus snort beside him, and the small noise diminished the portentous words.

"Don't believe everything you hear," he said, smiling to take the edge off his words. "Michael has a vessel."

"But –"

"Leah, these men are … uh … demon hunters, I suppose is the right term. They need to know what you've told us, what's happening," her father said, gesturing to the table in the middle of the long room. "I think they were brought here for a reason."

"Of course," she said, stepping back from Dean and turning for the table. "Sit down, I'll try to keep it short."

* * *

"She's not a prophet," Castiel said firmly. "Her name is not one I know. And she is not an angel, reborn into a human vessel, the way Anna was."

"Then who is she?" Dean looked at him. They were in a motel room in the business section of the town, and the noise from the bar across the street, and the one down the street were clearly audible through the thin walls.

"I don't know," Cas said frustratedly. "I'm cut off, in case it has skipped your attention. Maybe she's a conduit to the upper hierarchies. I don't know."

"The girl gets the info from the angels. She tells the townspeople what to do. That's all fine and dandy," Rufus said, shaking his head. "But why are the demons here? And what is with this town?"

They'd driven from the church to the motel and all three had noticed the distinctive areas in the town. Around the church, everything was organised, neat, tidy. Four blocks from the church, things started to get a little more funky, Dean thought. He'd counted four bars, two of which were advertising exotic dancers. Two brothels. A restaurant that had apparently been turned into a gambling establishment. And a shady-looking storefront, that had started life as an outlet warehouse but now seemed to be a fight club.

"Most of them seem to get along," he said, shrugging. "Maybe they realised they needed their vices? Speaking of which, where do you want to eat?"

"Paul's place," Rufus said, getting up. "Where are they getting their supplies from, Dean? There must be about eight, nine hundred people in this town. That's a lot of food to get through every day, but we didn't see anyone going out for supply runs, the pastor didn't mention it. And the booze that four bars would go through … they'd have to go a long way to find that in quantity."

"I don't know," Dean said, pulling on his coat and picking up the keys. He'd wondered about it as well. "We'll ask."

* * *

Paul Kearney's bar and grill was small and, compared to the competition down the street, quiet. They sat at the bar counter and ate the burgers and fries he served up, washing it down with beers.

"So where's the food come from, Paul?" Rufus asked between bites. Paul nodded to one of the waitresses, not a day over sixteen, Dean thought, watching her expertly load the waiting drinks onto a tray and serve them out.

"Got lucky," Paul said, wiping down the bar and bringing them another round. "Not more than a mile to the south there's a freight station. Twenty trains stopped there, all loaded. We've been getting the staples – flour, sugar, canned goods etc from there since the town was quarantined and the army food ran out. Boxcars full of booze too, or I'd have gone dry months ago, along with all the others."

"Army food?" Dean questioned.

"We had two incidents of the virus, the first week, before anyone knew what was going on. CDC came out, Army rolled in. They're the ones who put the fences up around the town. Didn't know it at the time, but we were damned lucky they did, it made it easy to defend ourselves when the demon attacks started."

"I'll bet it did," Dean said thoughtfully. "So the virus never spread, but the Army stayed?"

"No, they brought loads of food, guess they thought we were going to be in quarantine for a long time. Filled the schools and the vacant buildings with stores, everything, pretty much. Brought in generators and connected them up. Set up pretty much everything you've seen. Then they left, when things started to get bad across the country. We've been cut off from the news since around August 2010. But we knew when no one else showed what must have been happening. We kept our heads down and waited."

"When did the demons first come?" Cas asked him.

"It was about two months ago. Leah had the first of her 'visions' just before. She told us we were chosen by God to survive," the bartender snorted derisively. "Then the demons came and a lot of people discovered their faith straight away. Church was the only building that was protected and we ran for it." He gestured around the bar. "What you've seen in the town, they're the ones who made it there."

"Everyone else was killed?"

"No," Paul said, his face twitching with memory. "A lot of them were possessed. They … uh … kind of underlined what happened in Sodom and Gomorrah for those of us who couldn't quite get our heads around the whole biblical angle."

"But you still don't believe," Castiel said to him.

Paul looked at him. "I believe in demons. I don't think that praying to God is going to do much for us."

"And now the town is divided into believers and non-believers?" Dean asked.

"Not really," Paul said, polishing a glass and putting it back on the shelf. "Nearly all of these people go to church, pray till their throats are raw. Everyone here works hard. Some of them play hard too. Pastor Gideon, he's a reasonable man. He hasn't pushed the no-sex-before-marriage thing because he knows people will baulk at it. So long as it's not adultery, I guess, there's a certain level of tolerance for everyone to find their comfort levels however they can." He looked around the bar. "Most of these folks never went to church before in their lives. Now they go, services a couple of times a week, weddings, Leah's announcements, whatever. They pray when they're told to and if it was a Catholic church instead of Lutherian, I'm sure that, like the Irish, they'd be confessing to their regular weekly sins every Sunday too."

"But not you," Dean said.

"I'm not a hypocrite." Paul shrugged, looking at him. "Never prayed a day in my life, not going to start now because everyone else thinks it's a good idea."

Rufus chuckled. "Even if it is a good idea?"

"I'll believe that when I see it," Paul said. "What about you, you a believer, Dean?"

"He's had too much proof for belief," Cas answered for him.

"Proof, eh?"

"In a manner of speaking," Dean hedged.

Paul grinned at him sourly and went to serve his customers. Dean looked at Rufus.

"This place seems to have had more than its fair share of luck."

Rufus nodded. "Almost as if it had been picked."

"The question remains," Cas said, looking at both of them. "For what?"

* * *

Dean knocked on the door to the vestry and Leah's voice called out. "Come in."

He opened the door and walked in, stopping when he saw that she was lying on the sofa. "You okay?"

She nodded, sitting up. "I get … migraines, headaches … when they speak to me. Guess I'm not really designed for it." She smiled ruefully at him. "I'm fine. Did you want to speak to me?"

"Wanted to ask you a few things," he said, closing the door and sitting in the chair on the other side of the low table from her. "About what they've been telling you."

"I told you pretty much all there is before," she said.

"They told you about the devil's traps, and the stores in the trainyard?" he asked, watching her as she nodded. "And they've been telling you where the demons are, when they get close?"

She nodded again, a small crease appearing between the smooth brows as she looked at him. "What do you really want to know, Dean?"

"Is Michael still looking for me?"

"Yes."

The surety of her answer shocked him. He looked away.

"That can't surprise you, Dean," she said softly. "You are his one, true vessel. With you, victory is assured. Without you, Lucifer could win. He already has Sam, the vessel born for him. If he found you, destroyed you, or you kept hiding from Michael, he will find it much easier to fight Heaven, and if he wins, he will burn everything to the ground."

"You believe that?" he forced himself to ask her.

"Of course," she said. "The angels haven't lied about anything. Everything they've told me has come to pass exactly as they said it would. We're proof of that, proof that they care for us."

He felt a stab of pity for her innocence, being used so easily. "Leah, trust me on this, not all of the angels are acting in our best interests."

She smiled at him. "There are some that despair of your lack of faith, Dean."

"I'd rather not sacrifice half the planet to prove them wrong."

"God tests us in ways that are unimaginable to us," Leah said gently. "And you know, from your own experience that there are many, many people who are not caring of others, who hurt others, or are cruel –"

"You saying that God is going to pick who lives and who dies, Leah? I don't think it works that way."

"They have told me that when the battle of Armageddon is over, and Michael is the victor, those of us who have been chosen will have Paradise on Earth. No more demons. No more monsters. No more disease or evil or injustice. Just peace and love with those we love the most. Doesn't that sound like it's worth fighting for?"

"It sounds like a fairy-tale," he said.

"It must be hard," she said, looking at him sadly. "To be the vessel of Heaven, having no hope."

He didn't have a response to that and he got up and walked to the door, opening it and going through and closing it behind him.

She was right, in a lot of ways, he thought tiredly, walking out of the church and down the street. Even the promise of answers from the order's library in Kansas had been burned out of him. Sam was trapped and he didn't know how to free him. Lucifer was setting up to burn down the world, using the very weapons humanity had developed. His impotence in being able to do anything about any of it ate through him every day, every day that passed where nothing had been achieved to get him closer to Atlanta.

* * *

The klaxons blaring through the town woke them a little past two o'clock.

"Demon attack?" Rufus asked, picking up his coat and guns.

"Guess so," Dean said, rolling off the sofa and grabbing the gear.

There was a hammering at the door, and Dean opened it to see Paul standing there, half-dressed and wild-eyed. "Got a pack of werewolves at the south end of town and twenty demons attacking the east gate, Gideon sent me over to see if you could help out."

Rufus appeared beside Dean. "Werewolves? In a pack?"

"Full moon," Paul said, jerking a fist at the night sky. "You got silver bullets?"

"Plenty," Dean snapped, turning to Rufus. "You go help out with the werewolves, Cas and me'll go deal with the demons."

"Right," Rufus nodded and grabbed his bag, shoving the salt-loaded shotgun back into it and feeling for the custom 9mm Uzi that was loaded with silver. "Been saving this for a special occasion." He grinned at Dean and followed Paul down the street.

"Werewolves, in a pack," Castiel said as they ran toward the east gate. "That's not usual?"

"No," Dean said shortly, tossing a shotgun to him. "They don't normally hunt in packs."

The angel frowned as he followed him down the street.

They were a block away from the fence and gate when the rattle of machine-gun fire stopped them, and they saw the three men in the cross street standing over two others, lying on the ground.

"What's going on?" Dean yelled out, reversing his motion and slamming into Cas, knocking them both to the ground behind a parked car as the gun barrels swung toward them and the bullets punched through the air where they'd been standing.

"We're not demons!" he shouted, in a break between the shots. Rolling to the front of the car, he saw the men advancing across the street, reloading. "C'mon, we gotta get outta here."

He grabbed Cas' coat and hauled him to his feet, running for the darkness of the houses that backed onto the perimeter fence, hearing the sharp chatter of the guns behind them. What the fuck?

"Why were those men shooting at us?" Cas gasped as Dean stopped near the fence line.

"No idea," Dean said, looking down the fence. He could hear the engines of the trucks up ahead. Risking a low look around the corner of the house they stood next to, he couldn't see any of the men any more, swearing softly under his breath.

"Move your ass, Cas, we need to get to the gate," he told the angel, and they ran between the houses.

* * *

Rufus looked at the creatures attacking the fence in amazement. They were werewolves alright, he thought, thumbing off the safety on the Uzi and shifting to single shot. He'd never seen so many together.

Paul swung the barrel of his hunting rifle up, and started shooting, picking his targets as carefully as possible in the stark chiaroscuro of the scene in front of them. "Aim for the heart!"

Rufus smiled and pulled the trigger, shifting from monster to monster, the bullets punching through the chests, exiting in a welter of flesh and blood and hair from the backs as he walked along the fenceline. The gun's minimal recoil wasn't even bothering his aim as he killed them, he thought with satisfaction. He'd known making up the bullets for this baby, as fiddly and time-consuming as it had been, was worth it.

"Guess you've done this before?" Paul said as Rufus strolled back, checking the clip and slamming it back home.

"Once or twice," Rufus said with a grin. "You boys got yourselves silver bullets?"

"Took us a while to get the hang of it, silver is apparently a bitch to work with, but Clarence is a gun-maker and he had all the gear. Figured it out. Took us longer to work out how to kill the rest of them."

"Rest of them?"

"Oh, yeah, we're a regular monster mash here," Paul said sourly. "We've had werewolves and things that look like dogs, but aren't, had creatures that can look like people, until they start eating you … even had vampires, last month. Tried all sorts of things until someone took a head off by accident and we figured out that was the only way to stop them."

"Demons and monsters, aren't you the lucky ones?" Rufus mused, more to himself than to Paul. "And this started a couple of months ago as well?"

Paul nodded. "All the same time."

"All the same time," Rufus repeated. The same time that Dean had killed Lisa and Michael had resurrected Adam.

"_If Michael has another vessel, then he can resume breaking the seals."_ Jerome's voice filled his mind for a moment and he closed his eyes. The sixth Seal was the Whore of Babylon, the mother of evil and monsters.

He opened them, hearing screams coming from the business section of town.

"What the hell is that?"

"I don't know," Paul said, turning and starting to run. "Doesn't sound good."

* * *

Castiel watched as the hoses sprayed over the demons throwing themselves against the metal sides of the bus. From the two towers to either side of the road, the townspeople were firing down at them, the salt-loaded shells peppering the vessels with the rock crystals, the screams of the hellspawn almost drowning out the weapons.

"Don't think they need much help," Dean said to him, crouching beside the pickup as he looked across at the bus. Gideon had climbed to the top of the bus, holding his megaphone, and was reciting the exorcism over the demons.

The explosion from the centre of town got everyone's attention, heads snapping around to see a column of fire rising into the night sky above the main street.

"What the fuck?"

They ran toward the fire, Dean peripherally aware of others running in the same direction.

* * *

"What happened?" he said to Rufus, walking fast toward the older hunter as the fire consumed the bar at the end of the street and the brothel next to it.

"No clue," Rufus said. "We just got here too."

"Werewolf problem fixed?"

"Yeah, but get this, the town's had monster attacks for the last two months as well."

Dean stopped and looked at him. Rufus nodded.

"The sixth Seal," Castiel said from behind them. "I should've seen it. The whore is loose. And she's here."

"Who?"

"The preacher's daughter, I'm guessing," Rufus said, his face cold and hard. "Her visions, her announcements …"

"What do we do about it?" Dean looked at Cas. The angel exhaled, looking at the fire.

"Only a true servant of Heaven can kill her," he said tiredly. "Which means … none of us."

"The padre?"

"He would be the only hope here," the angel agreed.

"What's going on here?" Dean looked back at the fire. "Who's blowing shit up?"

"I suspect that the Whore has realised that her time is almost up here, and she's upped whatever she's pumping into the air to confuse these people to lethal quantities." Castiel looked back down at the street as a volley of gunfire was punctuated by screams. "She's harvesting souls for hell, Dean."

"Fuck." He looked down the street. "Rufus, you and Cas, see if you can't defuse whatever's going on here, I'll grab Gideon – what do we need to kill this bitch, Cas?"

"A stake made from a sacred cypress in Babylon," Cas told him dryly.

"Perfect," Dean snarled. "Any ideas on where we might find one of those around here?"

"Actually, yes," the angel said, looking past him and over the rooftops. "That's a mosque."

"Fascinating, but really, is this the right time for a discussion on religious architecture?" Rufus looked down the street at the mob gathering outside another building.

"The city of Babylon is in what you know as Iraq. The sacred tree still stands, two thousand years old and from it, the faithful have taken its seeds and planted them around the world, at their places of worship. If we're lucky, in front of that mosque there will be a cypress tree, a descendant of the original – and from whose branches we can make the weapon to kill the whore."

"Let's get to that tree then," Dean said. He turned and looked at Rufus. "Tell 'em they're booking themselves a one-way ticket to the pit, but don't take risks."

Rufus nodded and ran toward down the street, Paul following him. Dean looked at Cas.

"You get the stake, I'll get the pastor," he said shortly. "I'll see you at the church."

The angel nodded and ran for the cross-street. It would take him longer to run the two blocks to the mosque than it would've taken to get the stake from the present day site of Babylon and return, he thought, feeling the muscles of his vessel's burning as he forced them to move faster. He realised he didn't like being human.

* * *

Dean slipped in through the rear door, looking around as he walked through the dark vestry.

"Dean."

Leah's voice was soft and sultry in the darkness of the room and he turned slowly, seeing a flicker of movement, a shadow against the blackness.

"Whore," he replied casually.

She smiled and he frowned as he felt a deep throb inside. Mind games, he told himself. Not real.

"Oh, it's real enough," she said, walking to him. "Real enough to affect flesh and blood, to play on the nerves and reach past your control."

He stared down at her, the girl's face overlaid by a woman's, deep brown eyes filled with knowledge, with experience, with an open desire for him, and he couldn't look away, couldn't pull himself free of them.

"Greed. Gluttony. Sloth. Pride. Envy. Lust ..." she said, stopping in front of him, her hands light over his chest, slipping under his coat and unbuttoning his shirt. "... and Wrath. They call them the seven deadly sins, but they're the basics really. And greed is the most basic of them all … greed for food is gluttony. Greed for emptiness is sloth. Greed for self-congratulation is pride. Greed for the things of another – envy. Greed for the pleasures of the flesh, there you have lust. And greed for self-righteous anger, that's wrath."

Dean closed his eyes, his jaw clenching against the sensations that were building in him, spiralling through him, with the feel of her fingers on his skin.

"Like theft is the most basic of all crimes," she continued, getting closer to him, her scent, of musk and spices, filling his nostrils. "Theft of life is murder. Theft of love is adultery. Theft is really what the ten commandments are all about," she told him, walking around him, her hands finding the edge of the t-shirt and slipping underneath.

Sweat beaded on his brow as he suppressed the shivering groan at the touch of her hands, curving around his waist to caress him. He couldn't move away, couldn't even think of it, his senses dazed and his thoughts drowned out by the sensations that flowed thickly through his nerves.

"Of course, humanity rationalises them all … seduction, investment, gourmet … if you knew the number of words that were devised as a justification for the most basic sin, you'd be amazed."

He felt her breath against the back of his neck as she pressed herself against him, and he could feel the layers of whatever spell she was using, falling onto him like chains, weighing him down.

"Every person has a tipping point, Dean. Yours is responsibility. What breaks you is not pain or pleasure, not love or hate, or guilt or happiness. It is purely how closely you can come to the way you see your father."

"Would John have done this? Yes? No?" she laughed softly, her hands sliding under the waistband of his jeans, long fingers caressing the sensitive skin there until he was trembling with the effort of not moving, not speaking, with the struggle not to feel them.

"And you've come up short, every single time, haven't you?" She smiled against his neck, her lips brushing the skin lightly. "Failed at looking after your brother. Failed your father. Failed in Hell. Failed all the people you cared anything for. And now you're going to fail the world, because Lucifer wants you to die and I'm so happy to oblige him."

Her touch reached through him, lighting up the nerves, contracting the muscles and it would have been so easy to turn around and take her, finding savage release in that seventeen-year old body. _But that's what she wants you to do, fail again_, a voice whispered in his mind and the thought broke through the spell for a fraction of a second. She was a mind-reader, had been fishing through his memories, through his thoughts, knew what he was afraid of … he wasn't going to fail. Not again. Not now.

He sucked in a deep breath, his vision clearing and grabbed her wrists, twisting around, hearing her low laugh as he let the thoughts she'd stirred up through her touch loose in his head. She didn't struggle against him and he pushed her against the wall, pushing his hips hard against hers.

"Do it, Dean, take what you want, what you need," she whispered, her eyes alight with arousal, pushing back at him.

"Oh, I will," he said throatily, leaning close enough for his exhale to heat her skin. "You can count on it."

He stepped back, his elbow swinging hard and she didn't see it coming, didn't feel the intention at all, her mind seeing what he showed her, what she was expecting. The blow connected precisely with the nerve centre behind her ear and he watched her slump down the wall, crumpling on the floor at his feet.

The pastor had to be in here somewhere, he thought, feeling the hooks and barbs of her spell falling away from him, his body back under his control. He turned away from the unconscious girl on the floor, figuring he had about ten minutes at most, possibly less. Running to the interior door to the church, he saw Gideon at the same time as Castiel came in through the front.

Red-faced, the pastor was standing in between Rob's wife, Jane, and a group of twenty or so people, held in a loose circle in the aisle of the church by four men and two women with guns. Dean felt his stomach drop as he realised that the group being held were from the establishments along Main Street, a couple of them still clutching sheets around them, making it plain what they'd been doing when they'd been dragged out and down to the church.

"No, you cannot do this, this is not what God wants," the pastor said furiously, holding Jane back.

"Get out of the way, David!" she snapped back at him, raising the barrel. "Leah told us. She told us that they are sinners. She said the angels have appointed us warriors of the Lord, that we must wipe out the sins of this town or we'll all die."

"Those are – they are lies, Jane," Gideon said, his face twisting up. "God – the angels – they would never want you to kill!"

"Jane, it's Mary, you know I go to church, this is just – this just my job!" One of the women in the group said loudly, wrapping the sheet tighter around herself.

"Shut up, whore!" Jane spat at her and turned back to stare accusingly at Pastor Gideon. "You want us all to die, Leah wants us to live."

"You said it yourself, padre," Rob said quietly. "Leah's never been wrong, not once."

"This is different!"

"No," Jane said, swinging the gun barrel around to him. "It's not."

"Put the gun down," Cas said, walking toward them. "Leah is not a servant of God nor of the angels."

"How would you know?" Jane swung the gun's barrel around to him, the click of the hammer inordinately loud in the high-ceilinged room.

"Mom, I don't think that's –" Dylan walked up behind her and Jane spun around, her eyes wild as her finger tightened on the trigger automatically.

Dean watched the bullet hit the young man high in the chest, dropping him where he stood. He ran for Jane as she stood there staring down at her son.

"No, I didn't mean to –"

"Too late," Dean bit out, gripping her hand over the trigger guard and crushing it against the metal until she let go, pulling it away from her. He looked at Cas. "This is what she's doing? Setting them against each other now?"

The angel nodded, looking around. "God gave his Word. You shall not kill. That is the first commandment. And you have broken it, broken your covenant."

"What does that mean?" Rob stared at him, his gaze flicking back to his wife.

"It means no Paradise on earth," Dean said tiredly, kneeling beside Dylan, his fingers gently shutting the boy's staring eyes. "Padre, need a word with you, right now."

He looked back at Cas, taking the branch the angel held out. "Take the guns, lock this bunch in the church. If they kill each other with their bare hands, there's nothing we can do about that."

* * *

In the small room behind the altar, Pastor Gideon looked down at the floor and shook his head. "I can't, you can't ask that of me." He closed his eyes tightly as what the man had told him played over and over in his head.

"Padre, she's not your daughter any more, she hasn't been for two months, and you know it," Dean said, his fingers stripping the thin branches from the thicker one as fast as he could.

"Only a true servant of God can kill her, David," Castiel said quietly, coming into the room.

"You're an angel!"

"A poor example of one," Cas said bitterly, turning away.

Dean handed the stripped stake to Gideon. "He's pretty much fallen."

"You saw what she's done to your town, your people," Cas said, ignoring Dean. "She will incite them to sins far greater, the longer she lives. She will birth monstrosities and people the world with them. Humanity will not be able to stand against her if she reaches one of Lucifer's cities."

Gideon followed Dean and the angel to the vestry, and peered around them as he came into the room, seeing his daughter lying in a crumpled heap by the wall. His fingers closed around the wooden branch in his hand uncomfortably.

"I don't think I can –" he said, looking down at her.

"You have to," Dean cut him off. "It's not Leah. It's a monster."

"Hurry!" The angel turned back, his eyes widening as he watched the girl stirring. "If she wakes, we won't be able to hold her!"

Gideon knelt beside her, lifting the stake above his head, looking down at the vee of the buttoned sweater that marked where he would have to strike. He was shaking.

Leah opened her eyes and looked up at him. "Daddy?"

The second's hesitation, his doubt at the fear in her eyes, was all she needed. She lifted a hand sharply and Gideon was flung back against the opposite wall of the vestry, his head striking the stone as he tried to twist mid-air, the cypress branch falling to the floor.

Sitting up, Leah looked at Dean, her arm snapping out, fingers spread and he felt himself lifted and thrown to the doorway, tucking his head in as he hit the wall with his back, the air driven from his lungs. Turning to Castiel, she smiled as he rushed her, the gesture with her hand simultaneous with the Enochian spell, reaching into him and clawing at his organs, as her fingernails drew blood from her palm and she flicked the droplets over him.

Dean was on his feet, ignoring the fact he couldn't draw a breath without his ribs stabbing into him. He hit her from behind, knocking her to the floor, one arm over her throat as he reached for the branch. Under him, she seemed to bulge for a second, and he caught a glimpse of her true face, beneath the girl's, iridescent scales and a long forked tongue whipping between long, curving fangs. She lifted his weight easily off her, rising to her feet with an undulating motion that seemed impossible, and fell on him, her knees driving into his chest, splintering the cracked ribs further, her weight crushing him as she leaned over and slid her hands around his throat.

"Pitiful, pathetic, hopeless, helpless human," she spat at him, the droplets of her saliva burning where they touched his skin. "You are no servant of God, Dean, you are a coward, a freak, too weak, too afraid –"

His fingers found the end of the branch as his vision started to grey at the edges, her hands closing tighter and tighter around his neck, cutting off his air, cutting off the blood to his brain.

"– of what you have done, and what you have become. Michael will never have his vessel and I will fill this place with people begging me to grant their most base desires – your God will no have choice but to sweep them from the face of the earth himself."

"You – never – know –" Dean forced out the words past the constriction of her hands as his fingers closed around the branch. "Might – surprise –"

She looked at the branch in his hand and threw back her head, laughing, a screamy laugh that bounced off the stone and timber walls and floors, echoing back and forth. Sweeping the branch up and around, Dean drove it into her chest, vaguely surprised at the ease with which it punched through the bones and skin and muscle, seeing again the flickering glimpse of a smooth expanse of fine scales, bulging toward him.

The branch began to burn as it entered the body above him, charring the clothing and then the flesh, charring the bones as it touched them. Leah toppled off him, her laughter silenced, her eyes wide and staring as the branch seemed to be digging deeper into her on its own.

Rolling onto his side, Dean scrambled to his feet, coughing as his ribs ground together again with the movement. He pulled Cas up, the angel's face dripping blood from his mouth and eyes and nose, his arms crossed tightly over his abdomen as he staggered away from the creature on the floor, both man and angel moving back, away from her, to the still figure of Gideon, lying against the far wall.

Inside the vessel she wore, the ancient serpent coiled and twisted, lighting up the skin from beneath, like lightning inside a cloud, blue and gold and green and purple flashes that grew faster, deeper, longer. She opened her mouth and the long, forked tongue snapped out between the girl's plump lips, writhing furiously as the branch sucked more and more of the life from her, into itself.

Dean leaned against the wall, throwing his arm up to shield his face when the branch suddenly burst into flame, a wash of heat flooding the room and dissipating, followed by a concussive force that knocked them back against the wall, flames licking to every corner. The branch turned to ash and disappeared. Leah Gideon's body lay motionless on the floor in the middle of the vestry, a blackened hole in the centre of her chest.

_Only a true servant of God may kill the Whore._

Dean stared at the body, aware that on the other side of the girl's father, Castiel was staring at him.

* * *

They buried Dylan Murray in the graveyard behind the church two hours later, Pastor Gideon reading the service with a bandage wrapped around his head and another over the long slash on his arm. Rob flinched at the gunshot that followed the burial ten minutes later, but neither he nor anyone else was surprised by it. Jane had taken a revolver and disappeared before her son had been buried.

Dean looked around at the faces of the townspeople. Most of them seemed confused, unsure of what had happened or why they were standing there. Gideon offered no comfort to them, standing and looking at the pyre where several other people, the werewolves and his daughter were burning, on the edge of the perimeter fence around the town.

"Anyone who wants to come with us, to try a new life, is welcome," Dean said loudly. "Get as much as you can pack into a vehicle and follow us."

He'd laid out the details of the camps, what they had, what they were doing, what was going on in the country, and presumably the rest of the world to them – the ones who were left. They had supplies, guns, skills and vehicles. They would be useful.

Gideon had already agreed to come, his personal effects packed into an army duffle and sitting in the trunk of the Impala. Rufus and Paul had returned to the church when the Whore had been killed, followed by the people they'd been trying to dissuade from murdering each other. Rufus looked around at the faces as well. He thought maybe half of them would come. The others were too lost, in the poison they'd lived and breathed, in what they'd done, or the loss of their hope, to want to start again.

Neither hunter knew if the monsters she'd brought, had created here, had died with her, or if they were now free to move away from this part of the country. The croaties who'd been kept away, by Pestilence, by the Whore herself, they would be back, Rufus thought. The town was defendable, to a certain extent, although the virus had mutated enough so that civilians would find it hard to verify them now.

Dean got in the car as the people began to move away, some going for their own vehicles, others returning to their homes. He looked at Rufus as he got in on the other side, and started the engine.

"So …" Rufus said thoughtfully, looking at the younger man's profile. "True servant of God, eh?"

Dean's mouth compressed as he ignored the comment, putting the car into gear and guiding them through the night's wrecks and debris for the gate.

"You killed her, Dean, it's no use pretending that you didn't," Castiel said neutrally from the back seat.

"Long run of luck held," Dean said tightly, slowing as the bus pulled aside and the opening to the road widened. "That's all."

"No." Pastor Gideon eased himself straighter in the back, looking at Dean through the rear view mirror. "God tested me and found me wanting. But to you, He gave His strength. I can't pretend to know what that means, but I know what happened."

Rufus turned around to Castiel, lifting one brow quizzically. "Well, Cas? What does it mean."

The angel saw Dean shift his gaze, their eyes meeting in the mirror. "I don't know," he said to Rufus, turning away to look out the window.


	14. Chapter 14 Prelude to Death

**Chapter 14 Prelude to Death**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The sky was heart-achingly blue in the cold, crisp air, the lake a deeper blue, and the woods a mix of fiery reds, golds, amber and dark green, the deciduous trees blazing with colour against the pine forests. Over it all, Dean's deep voice rang out clearly.

"I didn't fucking well ask you for excuses, just get the damned job done the way I said!"

Alex looked up from the table in the kitchen, her eyes meeting Rufus' across it.

"Don't look at me," the hunter said, one side of his mouth lifting slightly. "I ain't getting' involved."

"Coward," she said to him, getting up.

He snorted. "Not stupid."

"He's your friend," she reminded him, as she walked to the door.

"Yep, and I'd like to keep it that way." Rufus shrugged, finishing his coffee.

She walked down the hall and turned to the front door, going out to the porch and seeing Dean standing next to two of Vincent's apprentices, both of them looking down at the ground, shoulders hunched against the anger still radiating from the man in front of them.

Dean glanced up at her, his face becoming stony. He turned away abruptly and walked back up the drive to the garage. He'd been angry and taking it out on anyone in his path since he'd gotten back from Boulder, with half a town in tow, and Rufus had only said that he didn't like being pushed, least of all by God. She wasn't sure what to make of the comment, but Dean would avoid a confrontation with her, walking away when she appeared, and she'd been using the odd behaviour as a defuser ever since.

Walking down the steps, she looked at Miles and Brandon now, one eyebrow lifted in query.

"We couldn't get the engine on the truck going," Miles blurted out, shifting his feet in the gravel of the drive.

"But it –" Brandon started and Alex shook her head, cutting him off.

"Did you ask Vincent?"

"He's out on a supply run, taking some of the new folks," Miles said.

"Charlie go with them?"

"No," Brandon said. "I don't think so."

"Get up there, and get him," she told the young men. "He'll get you started. And … just a tip, if Dean gives you a job, and you can't figure it out, go and ask him for help, before he comes around to see how it's going – he's better with that approach."

They nodded and hurried back up to the workshop, Brandon peeling off to get his car. Alex walked back up the steps and wondered what the hell she was going to do. Bobby and Ellen were holed up in Kansas, and would be for weeks, she thought. Rufus wasn't getting involved. Cas was around, but wasn't inclined to intervene, any more than the other senior hunters. Boze, Emmett and Maurice had all told her that fractured ribs took a few weeks to heal up and hurt like bitches until they did, and that was probably the reason for Dean's short temper.

Merrin had disagreed, the nurse being one of the few who hadn't heard the rough side of his tongue as she checked on the taping that Kim had wrapped around his chest. She thought it was tension driving Dean.

Maggie and Maurice had returned yesterday, both injured. What had been the nation's capital was a vast ruin of burned out buildings, filled with ghouls and wraiths and croaties, all feeding off each other, according to the two battered hunters. The museums, the libraries, the buildings holding the nation's histories had been more or less left intact, but fighting their way in and out of the city had been a nightmare of attack and counter-attack, ambushes and running fights over the four days they'd been there. Dean had been uncharacteristically unsympathetic, demanding to know if they'd gotten everything. When Maggie had told him fiercely that they had, he'd nodded and left them to Kim and Merrin's care, not interested in anything else.

Alex walked back into the kitchen and sat down at the table, staring unseeingly at the ledgers in front of her. With the harvest, their storerooms and barns were full, the silos on the farms packed, the concerted effort of drying and pickling, salting and preserving the vegetables and fruit had paid off in enough produce to see them right through the winter without rationing, even with the extra thousand that Rufus said would be likely from Boulder.

Liev and Terry had been working around the clock on the new camps and the main buildings had already been framed up, the cladding and roofs on, the interiors roughed out and the stockade wall dug and built and filled. Dave had organised what he called the 'cattle drive', bringing in the stock that had survived the first year and spreading the herds over the farms that lay closest to the camps. It was a sacrifice of cropping fields for pasture and hay, but he'd said it was worth it to have the stock, and she'd agreed. Milk and cream and butter, cheese and eggs and bacon and ham, beef and chicken, all sources of high protein that enabled the constant hard work required from the people living there. They supplemented those with game and fish, especially over the winter months.

Merrin and Beverly had both remarked to her that the people in the camps were healthier than anyone they'd been accustomed to seeing before the virus. Nothing they ate came pre-sweetened, Alex thought cynically. Just straight from the land and burned up in the endless chores and hard, physical labour that almost everyone participated in every single day.

People were being saved, she thought, leaning her chin on her hand as she looked over the columns in front of her, but none of that would matter if a different answer to the dark angel wasn't found. Castiel had told her about the prophecies of Heaven. The battle of Armageddon between Lucifer and Michael. He'd said bleakly that there no other way of defeating Lucifer.

* * *

Dean pulled the door of the cabin closed behind him, and sat on the steps, dragging his boots on. The woman he'd left on the bed inside had watched him dress in silence, and he hadn't said anything other than goodnight when he'd walked out. He wasn't sure of her name, only that she'd been willing.

Getting to his feet, he followed the thin path down through the trees to the lake, slowing as he followed the lake shore past the other cabins down to his. Despite the easing of the physical tension in his body, he didn't feel any more relaxed than he had before, his thoughts churning along the same path they'd been glued to for the past four days.

_You are the Michael-sword. Only a true servant of Heaven can kill her. The one, true vessel. Michael's best chance to defeat and throw down his brother. The Michael sword. Servant of God. You were raised because God commanded it, because he has work for you._

He stopped suddenly on the path, fist lashing out involuntarily, pain lancing through his knuckles and up his arm as it connected with the rough bark and solid trunk of the tree, more pain from the twist against the cracked ribs. He leaned against the tree, sucking air through his teeth, willing the pain to go, letting it wash through him and take his fucking thoughts with it.

Everyone looked at him differently now, the rumour mill fed by the townspeople of Porter's Mill who'd described the fight they hadn't seen with lurid and ever-expanding details. The expectations, unvoiced but clearly felt, made his skin crawl when he felt them looking at him. Hero. Saviour. Sword. It wasn't him. He had no idea of how to defeat Lucifer, other than the option that the angels kept trying to shove down his throat.

He reached his cabin and walked up the steps, pushing open the door and closing it behind him, walking in darkness through the living room and into the bedroom.

_You're a hunter. Not because your father made you, or because God raised you, but because it is what you are, and you love it, you find it in the dark every time. You're good at this, you will succeed._

The angel's words rolled through his head and he sat down on the edge of the bed. Would he succeed? Zachariah had been playing him, as they'd all played him, telling him he was the one to end it all, but never saying what that meant, for him or for the world that he'd been trying to save.

_What if they were right?_

Michael could defeat his brother, with the right vessel. With him. And Lucifer would be thrown down, defeated, and whoever was left would pick up the pieces and carry on, he guessed tiredly. But what if it was the only way? The only way to ensure that it wasn't Lucifer who had the victory?

He rubbed his hands over his face. They had the means to destroy demons in massed attacks now. Would that change anything? Would it change enough? If he led an army down to Georgia, would it be enough? He still didn't know how to defeat the goddamned fallen angel holding his brother hostage.

Destiny had been woven around him and Sam, from before they'd been born. What if it was the only way? What if he was endangering the people he'd saved, the world, by fighting the angels, instead of agreeing to Michael's request? What if the world was lost because he'd been too arrogant to help the archangel stop Lucifer? What then? Half a world was still better than no world at all.

Dragging in a deep breath, ignoring the stabbing pain in his side, he closed his eyes.

_Michael?_ he whispered the name in his mind.

There was no answer.

* * *

_**Boulder, Colorado**_

The Civic Centre was near the middle of the city, the biggest single building and surrounded by playing fields and parks. Jo crouched in the darkness of the landscaped garden, watching the guards as they patrolled around the perimeter, the bone handle of the Kurdish knife Dean had brought from Kansas warm in her hand. Twenty feet away, hidden in the deep shadows of a clump of bushes, Ty waited, and on the other side of the building, she knew that that Maurice and Mel were likewise positioned, waiting for the signal from the other side of the city that would let them know it was safe to move out.

She'd been a little surprised to find herself included in the teams for the job. She hadn't spoken to Dean since the night he'd turned her down, spending most of her time with the supply teams for the new camps, or taking the civilians out into the forest and teaching them to hunt. She supposed that she should've known that he would act as if nothing had happened between them, he'd always done that before, brushing off anything remotely intimate as if it was purely a figment of her imagination.

The temptation was very strong to lie to herself, to tell herself that there was something there, something that he wouldn't admit to, wouldn't allow out. But she knew it was a lie. Her mother had been brutally succinct on her opinion of Dean's interest, not that she'd ever told her anything, but Ellen Harvelle had eyes, as she frequently told her daughter, and they didn't miss much. Jo realised that her mother had had it right. Dean cared, a little. But not in the way she needed and not to the extent that she wanted.

The scene in his cabin hadn't affected the way he saw her as a hunter because that was the only way he saw her, she'd gradually realised. And the extent of his caring had been in not taking what he wanted when he'd wanted it. But that was all.

Better than feeling like Monica, she thought dully, remembering the young woman's teary confession last week with a grimace. The slim redhead had been flattered by the leader's attention and had gone with him willingly, apparently as ready to believe that he was over what'd happened as she'd been. And that _was_ something that Ellen had seen.

"_Jobeth Harvelle, tell me you didn't kid yourself into believing that he was past what happened with Lisa, telling yourself that he was ready for something other than a quick tumble?"_

_She'd been silent and her mother had stared at her. "You did, didn't you? And it never occurred to you that it's gonna take that man years to get over what he had to do? That he might never manage it? Or were you thinking that you're the one to help him to forget?" Ellen's tone had been dripping with sarcasm by the time she'd finished and she'd known her mother knew exactly that's what she'd thought._

She let out a soft exhale and pushed the memory aside. She'd been naïve, but worse, she'd been thinking of herself, not about him. Still thinking like a kid, she knew. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising that he treated her like one.

The guards came around the corner of the building and she shunted the thoughts aside, focussing on them. There were four on this side. Just her and Ty to take them out. They'd need a devil's trap on the other side of that corner, she thought, staring at them. Exorcise them or use the knife, and they'd have plenty of time to get the people out of the building and across the park to the train station. She smiled a little, at the thought of the train. It'd been missed by the team who'd done the first recce but Dean'd picked it up, and it would mean they could get them all out, in relative comfort and with little effort.

* * *

Dean walked up to the office building in plain view, the bag over his shoulder bumping quietly against his side. It'd been decided eventually that the bombs be encased in plastic bottles, to minimise the possibility of shrapnel damage to the thrower. Even Franklin hadn't wanted to waste a single bomb on tests and he hoped like hell they were going to work the way they were supposed to.

Using the stock of the shotgun, he smashed the glass front door and stepped through, smiling a little as he heard the clatter of bootsteps from the corridor to the left of the bank of elevators. He pulled out the first bottle, reversing it in his hand as the demons, more than a dozen massed together and coming for him, poured from the hall into the foyer. Leaning over, he dragged the magnesium pad across the granite tiled floor. It blazed up in his hand, burning furiously with a bright, white light and he lobbed it gently across the room, into the middle of the group.

The explosion took him by surprise, a rapidly expanding whoomf of heat and flame that brushed by him, too bright too look at it, and was gone a few seconds later. Lowering his arm and looking back at the end of the hall, there was nothing there, no demons, no meatsuits, no remains of the bottle or ash or anything. Then he shifted his gaze slightly, his eyes widening as he saw the shadows burned into the wall beside the elevators.

_Awesome_, he thought, walking to them and gingerly reaching out to touch one. There was no residue. The black shadows on the wall was smooth and hard. No mess, no fuss. He liked.

Pulling out his flashlight, he flicked the switch twice and saw a double-flicker of light from the darkness outside and he walked to the elevators and pressed the button. The doors opened and he stepped inside, turning and hitting the lit button for the top floor. He'd start at the top and work his way down. Rufus and Cas were tackling the next door building. Maggie had given him the double flash and she'd start at the bottom and meet him halfway.

* * *

Emmett looked at his watch. Another five minutes and Franklin and Max would be finished. The power station was an easy target, relatively speaking. The demons who'd been guarding it were baked into the wall of the control room, the single bomb working effectively. He'd laid two of the custom-built explosives in the room, running cable out and along the halls to the main cable junctions. The detonator for those was in his hand. Franklin and Max were in the building's basement, wiring up the turbines and generators. It would take Lucifer's engineering teams months to fix the damage, if it could be fixed at all. Franklin had an uncanny knack for destroying things well past the point of being repairable.

His thoughts drifted to the problem in the south. With the bombs, and enough trained people, he thought they could probably hit Atlanta, hard enough to give Dean the time to get to Lucifer. If Bobby and Ackers managed to find a way to kill the devil. If Dean didn't get himself killed taking point on every mission in the meantime. If they were lucky. If … if … if. Lotta ifs, buts and maybes, but that was how it went. You paid your money and you took your chances.

He wasn't sure what to think about Lucifer riding Sam Winchester. He'd met Sam a couple of times, hunted with him once. He'd spent more time with Dean, and earlier with John, than the youngest Winchester boy. It was screwing with his brother, the devil controlling Sam, he knew that much. Dean never talked about it, never brought it up, but it was there in his eyes whenever they talked about Lucifer. But even screwed up by that, by having to kill his woman, by having the angels and everyone else telling him that he was supposed to save the world, Emmett knew he'd back Dean Winchester against anyone else to get the job done. His ability to see the problem here, break it down and deal with it hadn't been affected by any of those things, so far as he could see.

He heard the soft two-tone whistle in the dark and pulled his thoughts back to the job, watching the shadows move through the undergrowth to join him on the ridge.

"All set?"

"Let's light this candle," Franklin grinned at him and they pressed the detonators together, the explosion lighting their faces as the building in front of them blew up.

* * *

"That's it," Jo said to herself, moving fast across the field, seeing Ty running to her right, from the corner of her eye. The demon guards came racing around the corner, slamming into the wall of air that surrounded the trap, and Jo pulled out her small bible, reading the exorcism as Ty ran past to the doors of the centre.

The intercom system was functioning and he found it easily, switching it on and starting to talk in a low voice, explaining what was happening, what was needed of the people inside, how it was going to work. By the time he'd finished, there were two orderly lines at each of the four exits and he watched the doors open as he hurried down to his, greeting and reassuring those at the front of the line slowly and carefully and turning them to join Jo's lines as they passed through the open door beside him.

Jo would take point, leading them across the park to the station. He'd take rear, checking that no one had been left behind and keeping the stragglers moving. They had a lot of people to get through but so far, at least, no one was panicking.

The park was lighter, Jo noticed as she walked across the frosty grass. She could see the outlines of the trees, the rise of the ground. Looking east, she saw the horizon, a black cutout against the dove grey sky and she drew in a deep breath, trying not to hurry, talking to the people who walked behind her, checking back over her shoulder frequently as the two lines of men and women followed her trustingly.

The train was an old-fashioned steam engine, and the steam rose in pearly puffs above the engine, huffing loudly as they approached. There were twelve carriages attached to it now, mostly box cars at the end, and Jo lifted her hand as Maurice stuck his head out of the side of the engine, grinning widely at her.

The line, all the same gauge, all the same width, went from Boulder up and across the country to Iowa. It was a tourist run now, but it used to haul stock and timber across the states. The engine wasn't dependent on electricity and they would be able to take it as far as the coal car behind the engine would allow, further if there were any deposits along the way. There hadn't been time to check the line or the provisions for it before they'd come, but a few people at the camps had said they'd ridden it fairly recently, before the virus. There was a very good chance that the tracks were intact, all the way along. And all they needed was coal and water.

Jo watched the people climbing into the carriages, packing in tightly, their faces tight with tension, with hope, with fear. As the last were squeezing into the box cars at the end, Emmett and his crew arrived, leaving the truck they'd come in at the end of the yards, walking up to put the hex bags along the cars. Dean, Rufus, Cas and Maggie would be driving home, but the train would have the eight hunters, taking watches on the way, there to protect the people they'd all risked their lives saving, if any demons did happen to notice them.

"All of them on?" Emmett asked her as he came close. Jo nodded.

"Yeah, no problems," she said. "Power's out?"

"Dead as a doornail," Emmett confirmed. "Whoever's left in there will have a hell of a job getting it running again."

"Good."

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Bobby rubbed his eyes tiredly and closed the book, leaning back in the chair and sighing deeply as his body let him know that he was too old for this shit. On the other side of the table, Ellen looked over at him and smiled.

"Get some shut-eye, Singer," she said gently.

"Might as well, haven't found anything," Bobby agreed sourly. He winced as he straightened up, and Ellen's eyes narrowed.

"What is it?"

"Nothin'," he said. "Just getting old."

"I would've thought you'd've learned not bullshit me by now, Bobby," she said, getting up and walking around the table. "Your legs or back?"

"Both," he said. "They'll be fine."

"They won't, you know." Ellen leaned against the table next to him. "Let me help, Bobby. I know you think it's a waste of time, but please … let me try."

He looked up at her, a flush of heat filling his face as he saw the sincere plea in her face. He didn't know if he could stand that level of intimacy between them, didn't know if he could bear her knowing how broken he really was.

"Ellen, I –"

"I've found one!" Jerome's voice bellowed from the situation room excitedly and they both turned to look down through the wide archway.

"What?" Bobby said, loud enough for the other man to hear, grateful at the interruption as he wheeled his chair down the ramp.

"A satellite," Jerome said, his fingers flying across the keys. "One we can use."

Ellen followed Bobby slowly, stopping behind Jerome and looking at the incomprehensible screeds of data flowing up the screens in front and to either side of him.

"Can you contact the other chapters?" she asked curiously.

"Trying that now," Jerome said, glancing at the map drawn on one screen to his left.

Bobby stared at the screen closest to him. The data flow had stopped, a prompt flashing in one corner. A line appeared after it suddenly, the flashing prompt moving down to the next line.

"Jerome." He pointed to the screen. Jerome turned to look, almost sagging with relief as he read it.

"_Phoenix One, this is Phoenix Two. Glad to see you made it."_

* * *

_**Boulder, Colorado**_

"I like those bombs," Maggie said to Dean as she saw him coming up the hall.

He nodded. "All done?"

"Nothing left but char marks on the walls," she confirmed smugly. "They kept coming out like roaches and I kept frying 'em."

The distant explosion lit up and shook the glass windows of the office building and Dean and Maggie walked over to them, seeing the blazing inferno a half mile away. In the office, the after hours lights and all of the power lights on the equipment in the building went out.

"That's our cue," he said, pulling out his flashlight and heading for the stairs. Maggie followed him.

"Do we check on the train?" she asked as they walked down. He shook his head.

"No, we'll go direct. They've got eight on board and the hex bags and another bag full of bombs, there won't be anything we can add to help. We'll catch them in Iowa."

"It was a helluva plan," she said, as they came out onto the street, crossing to meet Rufus and Cas.

Dean glanced at her in surprise, knowing from Bobby's often rueful remarks that the woman rarely gave compliments. "Yeah, well, we won't know if it worked until everyone's back, alive."

Maggie heard the edge in his voice and let it go. He was running on his nerves, she thought. Too much had happened and he wasn't giving himself any time to deal with it. She'd heard about the impatience and temper from others, but she hadn't seen any sign of it on the job. He'd been coolly professional to everyone, trusting them to do their jobs, exactingly competent in doing his own. As the four of them walked through the dark streets to cut through the parks and get back to the black car, parked a mile away, she wondered if he realised that he'd become the ad-hoc leader of all five camps now. Probably not, she thought. He wasn't interested in anything other than getting the jobs done and getting down to Atlanta. And with the success of the bombs here, that would be creeping up the agenda now.

* * *

_**Atlanta, Georgia**_

The angel never slept.

There were times when his attention was gone. When, in the brain of the vessel he filled, he dreamed. And in those times, the mind trapped in the lattices of nerve and neuron also dreamed.

Or woke. Sam wasn't sure of the exact nature of the state he was in, most of the time.

He had visions. Flat, two-dimensional visions, like a slide show, almost, slowly recognising that they were the angel's memories, for lack of a better description. They weren't like human memories. But they showed Lucifer's past, sometimes in detail so acute Sam couldn't look at them any more.

He understood now. Understood more. It had taken him a long time to feel himself again. To feel the _Sam_ part of him, distinct from his body, distinct from the parts that Lucifer had taken over and used. He had come back to himself in tiny fragments, the pieces finding each other, drawing together, becoming a whole. Or as much of a whole as was possible.

The angel burned with hatred for his brother, that fury ebbing and flowing through his consciousness, and ironically, it helped Sam to remember too. He saw Dean as Lucifer did … stubborn, reckless of his own death, planning, succeeding wildly where the devil had thought that failure was guaranteed. The angel's view prodded the memories that lay within his mind, a lifetime of fierce, protective love, of skill and daring and careful consideration, of careless affection and a will that didn't acknowledge defeat. Or hadn't. Until.

Dean had done something else, he knew, in the fractured way he could feel Lucifer's thoughts or intentions, could feel his own. Something else impossible and he'd succeeded. The angel's anger had flooded through the vessel like a blast furnace and Sam had felt it, hiding his reaction.

Lucifer was sure that he was getting help. The nature or source wasn't clear in his mind, but it generated a fear-edged fury that rocked the vessel and made those times when the angel disappeared and he could see again more frequent.

There were prophecies in Heaven. Prophecies of a Second War, angel against angel and the pillars falling, the creations of their Father being destroyed. Like most prophecies, these were ambiguous. They spoke of a dragon being trapped and released, and the release could be to freedom or to death. A man stood at the centre of the prophecies, a man who seemed to be the pivot, his actions sending the lines one way or the other. They made the trickle of fear in the angel grow.

The face that Sam saw was not a man. Heart-shaped, framed in tangled, maple-gold curls. Luminous blue-green eyes. She was always frightened, when he saw her. But she saw him. Saw _Sam_, not the devil. He didn't know how that was possible. Didn't know how to use it. Didn't know if she could take a message to his brother about the prophecies as he'd come to understand them. That it was possible to destroy the angel but not as Michael's vessel. Nor with the rings of the Horsemen. Nor with any weapon that Dean could find. It was the oil. And the Spear. And the most powerful of the entities that the angel controlled. The pieces were still fragmentary, still circling each other, looking for their places. It was very hard to think linearly in this state. But it was coming.

* * *

Lucifer stared at the old man, standing in the circles. The Horseman didn't fear, he knew. Didn't fear anything or anyone. And the bright lick of his anger burned against the bonds that held him, promising silently that Death would come quick to the one who'd bound him, but not necessarily painlessly.

For now though, the angel thought, ignoring the tendrils of fear that curled inside of him, he was held, and forced to do the bidding of his captor.

The Enochian spell passed over the circles, releasing the entity's form while holding its essence. The pale rider stepped across the lines slowly.

"And when shall we three meet? By storm and lightning?" Lucifer said, smiling at him.

The entity tilted his head slightly, looking at the angel humourlessly. "Don't you know it's bad luck to quote Macbeth, Lucifer?"

"Bad luck for them, not for me," Lucifer returned, staring back at the creature. "Storms. Winter storms to smash down their buildings, to lay their harvests in the fields, ruined and mouldy."

Death refrained from pointing out that it was October, and most of the harvests would have already been in, stored and safe from weather and vermin. The angel facing him was filled with arrogance. It was unseemly for an angel to suffer from a sin that most humans could not avoid but this was their flaw, these fierce and lovely creatures, that they had the emotions of humankind, without the souls that could temper them.

He turned away from Lucifer and vanished.

Lucifer looked back at the circles. The shade of the entity stood there, the part that was bound, that would keep him on leash and under control. He should have sent the others out in the same way, he thought bitterly. But he hadn't seen … hadn't seen that they would be in danger. They were Horsemen – had been Horsemen – no one could've seen that a simple human could've taken them down.

"Death is riding over the land, Sam," he whispered in the silent room. "I told you not to hope."

* * *

_**Camp Lake West, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Wrapping her coat more tightly around her, Alex climbed the steps to the building's porch, following it along until she was out of the wind and could draw a breath. She pushed her scarf down under her chin and looked at Liev as she came up to him.

"Don't worry," he said, putting his arm around her shoulders as he walked with her inside. "We'll be ready when they get here."

Dean, Rufus, Cas and Maggie had arrived yesterday, with the news that the train had met up with the buses in Iowa and were on their way back. To the north and west, a dark grey line of cloud had been growing over the last twenty hours, sending an Arctic wind ahead of it and promising the first of the winter storms, early and looking like it would be a very bad one.

"Did Vincent get the stores over alright?" she asked, unwinding the scarf and pulling her gloves off.

Liev nodded. "The basement rooms are full, we transferred a load over from the farms two days ago."

"What about fuel?"

"Plenty, the underground tanks all at capacity. The gennies are in the bunkers and up and running," he gestured at the lights in the room. "We had fifty volunteers from Tawas and Sable to move in here and get things setup for the new folks. Vincent tells me that Patricia is a hell of a cook and to pass on his thanks for your recommendation."

She smiled wryly, nodding. "What about South Farms?"

"Same as here, pretty much," Liev shrugged. "We can take a run down there to look it over, if you want?"

"Yeah, I think so," she said, looking around the living area. It was comfortable looking, furnished and the fire crackling in the huge hearth, warming the room, the vents along the ceilings carrying that warmed air to the bedrooms and bathrooms above. "You got the bedding and extra clothing?"

"Relax, Alex," Liev laughed. "We got everything on the lists, it's all here. And at South Farms. They won't arrive to nothing."

"Okay." She wrapped her scarf around her head and neck again and pulled on her gloves as she followed him out to the porch.

Rufus and Maggie had confirmed the numbers. If the buses could get here ahead of the storm, they would be able to accommodate most in the two new camps, doubled up somewhat in the others for the rest.

Everyone was outside, working to move anything that might be likely to become a missile in the strong winds inside or tying it down, most of them from Tawas and Sable and Chitaqua.

"Do we have transport to get these people back to their camps?" she asked Liev as she climbed into the pickup next to him.

He nodded. "Got the buses from Wichita serviced and running." He gestured to the perimeter wall as he started the pickup and eased down the gravel road toward the gate. "Hex bagged and retrofitted with a steel frame, they'll be in service to take people from one camp to another, when we have to move people around in bulk."

He turned on the heater as the icy cold air filled the cab of the pickup, waving at the gate guards and turning right as the drive met the road. They headed south. "The Boulder run didn't seem to lift Dean's mood any."

She looked through the windshield, catching the corner of her lower lip between her teeth. It hadn't. But she hadn't expected it would.

"More people, more responsibility," she said, lifting one shoulder in a helpless shrug. "They tested the bombs successfully, I think that's the only thing that he was really happy about."

* * *

_**US-23, Michigan**_

Jo looked out of the windows of the bus, as the snow came down harder. "It's a blizzard."

Ty nodded. They'd put chains on the drive wheels six hours ago, the long convoy stopping in a little town that had seemed to be empty, filling up the tanks, as the snow had begun.

Sixty buses, a dozen trucks, several RVs and two dozen cars were struggling through the ever-decreasing visibility. He saw the sign for Tawas City flash by, hidden immediately by the swirling flakes. Had it been ten miles or twenty? He couldn't be sure.

"We're not far," he said worriedly to Jo, slowing down again as the road disappeared in front of him.

"I don't think these people are going to be able to make it on foot," Jo said, looking back at the silent men and women huddled together who filled the bus. "Try the radio again."

Ty picked up the mike. "CQT, CQT, this is Outrider, repeat Outrider, over?"

The radio hissed slightly, static over the line. He took a deep breath, trying again.

"CQT, CQT, this is Outrider, can you read us, over?"

Jo looked down at the radio, willing a response to come from the speakers. The convoy stretched out for a mile behind them, maybe more with the vehicles slowing as the storm got worse. They needed help, and they needed it fast.

"CQT, CQT, this is Outrider," Ty said again. "CQT, this is Outrider, come in, over?"

The channel remained obstinately silent and he put the mike back with a sigh. "I'll try again in a while," he told Jo, changing down a gear as the rear end slid a little on the road. She nodded, and watched the flakes. They were falling more thickly now, almost horizontal as the wind swept across the farmland from the north and west.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean walked down the drive from the garage, knocking the packed powder from his boots as he climbed the steps to the porch. It'd been snowing harder and harder for the last few hours, the wind chill dropping the temperatures fast. Every camp was hunkered down, firewood filling the porches and lining the walls of the buildings. Livestock had been brought in, machinery either shedded or tied down. There wasn't much else to do but wait.

He thought of the convoy heading across the state toward them, hoping that Jo and Maurice and Emmett would have the sense to get the survivors into a town and under shelter before it got too bad. Going in through the front door, he had to push hard to close it, the wind pressing against him, sending a spiralling flurry of snow in past him and across the hall.

Pulling off the thick coat and gloves, he hung them up on the overflowing coat rack beside the door and headed down to Bobby's office, the warmth of the house seeping into him gradually. He opened the door and stopped as he saw Alex and Rufus sitting on either side of the big desk, going over a book that lay open between them, both looking up at him.

"Sorry," Alex said, getting up and closing the book. "Kitchen's full and there wasn't anywhere else private to go over this stuff."

He glanced at Rufus, seeing the half-amused question in the dark eyes, and shook his head. "You don't have to leave."

Alex picked up the books and tucked them under her arm, walking around the desk to the door. "It's fine, I've –"

Dean reached out as she passed him, fingers closing around her wrist. "Yeah, well we can't exactly not –"

The CB radio on the shelf next to the desk squawked loudly, and he dropped her wrist as he turned for it, Rufus swivelling around his chair as they heard the faint voice through the loud crackle and hiss.

"… _Outrider … hear … bad …"_

Crossing the room, Dean grabbed the mike, adjusting the squelch slightly as he pressed the button. "Outrider, this is CQT. Repeat Outrider this is CQT, can you read, over?"

"_CQT, reading you … storm … can't see …"_

"Outrider, this is CQT, where are you? Over." He fiddled with the tuning, trying to pick up the frequency more accurately.

"_CQT, edge … Tawas … miles … can't get through."_

The radio squawked again and the signal faded. Dean dropped the mike and looked at Rufus. "We'll take the four wheel drives, as many of them as you can find, get on the horn to Liev, Boze, Vincent and Rona and tell them to get chains on and drivers."

Rufus nodded, turning to the SSB radio and changing the frequency to the ones the camps were using.

Dean turned to Alex. "We'll take them all to South Farms. Who's there now?"

"Liev and Paul, some of the Kansas people," she said quickly. "I'll let them know."

He nodded and walked out the door fast.

"Rufus, I'll tell the camps," Alex said walking up beside him. "We've got eight good four-wheel drives here and Rob can tell you who can handle them."

Rufus got up and left the office, heading for the living room. Alex sat down in front of the radio and called Tawas, relief filling her when Boze's voice came from the speakers.

* * *

_**US-23, Tawas City, Michigan**_

Dean slowed down, staring at the mounds of featureless white that lined both sides of the road. Parked cars or the wrecks they'd shifted from the road when they'd been working the town. Buried now.

He hit the brakes as he saw a flash of light ahead, catching a glimpse of movement through the swirling flakes. Behind him, the other cars stopped, taillights reflecting blood red over the snow banks.

Leaving the engine running, he got out of the car, pushing through the thick drifts toward the flashlight beam, his own lighting up the white ground. As he got closer, he could see the long line of people following the leader, stumbling and falling, getting up, struggling on.

"Dean?" Jo's voice was snatched by the wind and he ploughed through the snow toward her, looking down at her face, half-hidden by the scarf she had wrapped around her neck and over her mouth. "Thank god." She looked past him to the vehicle lights gleaming in the snowy darkness.

"We couldn't get any further," she gasped as she stopped in front of him.

"Get them into the cars," he told her curtly, looking back at the line. "More are coming, from the other camps. We're taking everyone to South Farms."

She nodded and looked back, lifting the arm that held the flashlight and sweeping it forward. Dean moved back down the line, helping a man to his feet as he fell beside him, his mouth thin as he realised that they were all thinly dressed, shivering, their skin bluish in the headlights behind him.

"Keep going," he told the man. "Cars just up ahead."

Emmett's bulky frame loomed out of the white ahead of him, the hunter smiling through the ice and snow that caked his face. "Good timing, as usual."

"We don't have enough cars to take everyone, Emmett," Dean said in a low voice. "Get the weakest ones up the front, it's another three miles to South Farms, a lot of these people are going to have to walk it."

Emmett nodded. "Any help will be something, and hot food and a warm fire at the end of it should keep them going."

"There'll be that," Dean promised. He turned away, heading down the line, hearing the engines of the cars rev a little as they backed up the road, filled with the first load of survivors, turning around and heading north, the wash of the taillights sweeping over the faces of the people who were fighting their way through the snow. More cars came slowly down the road and more people were loaded up as the snow filled the air, settling over everything.

* * *

_**Camp South Farms, south Tawas Lake, Michigan**_

"Come on, get up, keep going," Dean said, pulling the woman to her feet, pushing her forward. He could see the bonfires, lit to either side of the gates of the camp, no more than a mile away now.

"Keep your eyes on the fires," he told her, looking around, moving to another who'd fallen, the snow covering them quickly.

"Up!" Reaching down, cold and weariness eating at him as his hand closed around the arm, he leaned back and pulled. He swore softly as he felt the dead weight, saw the head roll back limply, skin and lips white. The girl was wearing jeans and a thin sweater, and he felt for a pulse, fingers pressing against the side of her neck. There was one, faint and thready, but beating.

Ignoring his body's protest, he pulled her up, shifting his feet as he found his balance in the deep snow and settling her over his shoulder. _Keep your eyes on the fires_, he told himself wryly, following the straggling line up the long rise.

Eyes half-closed against the blinding flurries, Dean missed the curve in the road, falling to his knees as the ground dropped out from under him, tightening his hold on the woman he carried.

"Easy there, pal, you're almost there," the voice came out of the white beside him and he grunted as he felt a hand lock around his arm, pulling him up the slope and back onto the firmer surface. "Christ, Dean?"

"Yeah," he said, stumbling a little as the girl's weight shifted on his shoulder.

"You the last one?" Terry said, peering into his face, the flashlight beam reflecting from the snow.

"So far as I know," Dean said, taking a step forward. "Anyone counting heads?"

"Alex is at the gate," Terry said, pointing ahead with the light. "She suggested the bonfires, couldn't even see the big spotties fifty yards from the wall."

Dean nodded, feeling the snow thinning out as they got to the fires. He couldn't feel their heat, the wind whipping the flames around, but he could see better, the flakes coating his lashes melting off as he passed between them.

"Tony, Ray, get the girl and take her up to the building."

He heard Alex's voice snap the order out near him and felt the weight lifted off his shoulder, a hand curling around his arm as he tilted to the side with relief.

"Shut the gates, that's the last one," she called up to the guards and he heard the deep rumble of the heavy gate closing along the track.

"How many?" he asked, wiping a hand over his face and looking at her.

"Eleven-ninety," she replied, the big, powerful flashlight in her hand lighting the road up to the main house. "Including the hunters and the rescuers."

"So how many we'd lose?"

"Eighteen," Alex said. "That's from Jo's count when they got on the buses in Iowa."

He nodded tiredly. He'd looked for people, walking down the line to the end and following along to keep track of the stragglers, but even the girl had been almost covered when he'd seen her, others could've disappeared by the time he'd gotten to them.

Along the front of the building, cars and trucks had been parked haphazardly, and they walked in between them, pushing through the drifts that had filled the spaces. He glanced down at her when they reached the steps.

"You didn't have to come here."

She shrugged. "Liev said he was going to be driving, it seemed like they could use someone to check on the numbers and get things going. Rufus brought me out."

They walked into the hall, the men who'd taken the girl from him closing the big door behind them. His face began to tingle in the warm air, and he rubbed it gingerly, coughing as the difference in the air temperature hit his lungs. The hall, the living areas, the kitchen, dining room, offices and even the staircase were packed full of people, blue fading from their lips, shivers slowly dissipating, most of them holding bowls or cups of hot stew or coffee, eating or drinking slowly and looking around, their expressions blank or confused for the most part.

"Come on," she said to him, threading her way through the crowd. "There's a small room at the back of the kitchen Liev's been using as a temporary office. You need something hot inside you."

He followed her down the hall, and through the kitchen, taking a bowl of steaming food on the way through. The small room held a desk and a couple of chairs and Boze, Emmett, Jo, Maurice, Ty, Maggie, Rufus, Rona, Vincent, Mel, Franklin, Liev, Terry and Matt standing around the walls, sitting on the floor, eating, talking quietly. He stepped in, half-turning as Alex slipped behind him and went back out, then looking back around the room.

"Don't suppose anyone remembered to get snowploughs and gritters from town before this?" he said dryly, leaning against the doorframe and scooping a spoonful of stew into his mouth.

Liev smiled. "Six of them, up at Tawas and Sable. They'll start clearing the roads in the morning."

* * *

_**US-23, Michigan**_

The angel walked through the storm unhurriedly, leaving footprints on the tops of the drifts, filled almost immediately as he passed. It was one of the few opportunities he had to seek out the man he wanted, unseen by others, hidden by the ferocity of the Horseman's work.

Under the snow by the side of the road, he felt the dead. Their troubles were over now, he thought, striding along the snow banks. They would go to a place where nothing would ever trouble them again. He snorted to himself. Platitudes for the unimaginative.

He looked up, seeing the fires, and reached outward toward the camp. Sigils and wards had been graven and embedded and sealed in the walls and in the ground. He wouldn't be able to enter the compound, would have to persuade the guards to bring the man to him. He thought about the best way to do that.

* * *

_**South Farms, south Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Jo watched Dean as he walked through the living room. Makeshift beds and cots and blankets on the floor held the people who'd struggled to get here from Boulder, their tired faces lit by the firelight from the hearth, by the few lamps that had been left on.

Dean stopped in the middle, looking around, and she saw his attention sharpen as he walked toward the woman who was sitting curled into an armchair under one of the lamps, a book open on her knees.

There weren't many people he would actively seek out, she thought, watching him stop in front of the chair, look down at Alex. Was there something more there than just the necessary interactions of their respective positions in the camps? It was hard to tell. Perhaps a mutual respect was all that she was seeing.

* * *

Alex looked up as Dean stopped in front of her. When she'd seen him, carrying that girl up the drive, snow caked over his hair and face and clothes, it'd been easy to talk to him, easy to put aside the discomfort she felt in his presence, the uneasy warning prickle that seemed to permeate any conversation. That feeling had disappeared now and she shifted a little in the chair, wondering what he wanted.

He crouched down beside the chair, glancing at the fire, then looking back at her, the uneasiness she was feeling mirrored on his face.

"Hey, I … uh … just wanted to –" he stopped, his gaze dropping to the floor as he dragged in a deep breath. "Renee told me you've been talking with Ben. I wanted to ask how he was."

"Oh," Alex said quietly, feeling relief coursing through her. "He's … getting through it, slowly."

Dean nodded, his exhale audible. "Good, that's good, right?"

"He heard his mother say something," she added, hesitantly. "To you. When it happened. It's made it harder for him to deal with. It might help if you could talk to him."

His gaze flicked up to her and for a fraction of a second she saw panic in his eyes. "I – no, I can't talk about that."

Watching the emotions warring in his face, Alex sighed softly. "It's okay."

"You can tell him – none of it was true."

She smiled a little sadly. "I have. It doesn't help him to hear it from me. I'm sorry. But he needs to hear it from you."

He got to his feet, shaking his head. "That's – I just can't," he said finally.

"Dean!"

He turned around to see Rufus standing by the doorway to the hall.

"Guards are on the radio, they got someone outside who says he has to see you."

Alex watched his brows draw down together as he crossed the room, stepping over the sleepers.

"Who?"

"Wouldn't say," Rufus said, gesturing to the hall. "They put twenty rounds in him, didn't flinch. Says he's here to talk to you."

_Twenty rounds_, Dean thought, one brow rising in surprise. _Not human_. That still left the field wide open. "He's at the gate?"

Rufus nodded, passing him a shotgun. "You gonna check him out?"

"Yeah."

* * *

Dean stared at the man on the other side of the gate. "What the hell are you doing here?"

The man smiled at him. "Relax, I come bearing gifts."

"Who is this clown?" Rufus looked at the man. They were wrapped in coats, scarfs, gloves and the man in front of them was wearing a t-shirt and brightly-coloured Bermuda shorts, a pair of sunglasses pushed to the top of his head.

"Clown is right," Dean said sourly. "This is Loki."

The man's face screwed up in a rueful grimace. "Yeah, not really."

"What?"

"Not really Loki," he repeated. "If I were Loki, I wouldn't have any troubles with your finger-painting and home décor," he added, gesturing around at the sigils, invisible in the snowfall. "Actually, I'm Gabriel."

"As in …" Rufus looked at him suspiciously. "The archangel?"

"Yep, that's right," Gabriel agreed immediately. "Of the horn, smiter of sins, yada-yada-yada."

"How'd you find me?" Dean cut across him.

"Well, let's just say I got a tip from an old friend, and leave it that," Gabriel prevaricated.

"Let's not," Dean said, swinging the barrel of the shotgun up.

"Dean, even if I was Loki, that thing wouldn't do anything to me," Gabriel pointed out reasonably. He glanced up at the guards on the wall. "These two have tried to turn me into Swiss cheese already and as you can see …"

"What do you want?" Dean ground out.

"I want to pass on a message," Gabriel said, shrugging.

"Archangels are message boys now?" Rufus looked at him disbelievingly.

"When duty calls," Gabriel said, his eyes narrowing a little. "This message is from Death."

"The Fourth Horseman," Dean said flatly. Gabriel nodded.

"This is his handiwork, you should know," Gabriel said, gesturing at the storm around them. "And it's going to get a lot worse."

"Any good news?"

"He wants to meet with you," Gabriel said. "Just the two of you. _Mano-a-mano_, as they say."

"That's not good news," Rufus frowned at him.

"He's working for your brother, isn't he?" Dean looked at Gabriel. "Why would I stick my neck out to meet him?"

"He's working for Lucifer under duress," Gabriel clarified. "He wants the leash off, and he thinks you're the one who can do it."

"Does he?" Dean said softly. "And what do you think, Gabriel?"

"I think that Lucifer didn't read the prophecies properly, but then I've been keeping out of this whole thing."

"Until now," Rufus said, staring at him.

Gabriel inclined his head. "Until now."

"Where is he?" Dean asked.

"Chicago."

Dean looked away, smiling. "Wouldn't have to lift a finger to kill me there, would he?"

"Full of croaties and monsters, I know," Gabriel said, pulling a thin chain with a medallion on it from his pocket. "He gave me this to give to you. It's protection against being seen by … well, by anything actually."

Dean held out his hand warily and the archangel dropped the chain into the palm. The medallion was old, pitted, the design at the centre curiously hard to make out, his eyes slid off it all the time, unable to hold their focus.

"Token of his good faith," Gabriel said, looking down at the necklace. "It works, I can tell you that."

"How am I supposed to get Death off Lucifer's leash?" Dean closed his fingers around the necklace, tucking it into his jean pocket.

"The four rings make up a key, Dean," Gabriel said, his face losing the last traces of humour. "A key to unlock the Cage. You can put Lucifer back down in the pit and save the world."

"And Death – what? Just wants to give me his ring?" Dean looked at him, the one-sided smile mocking.

"That's the message," Gabriel said, nodding. "He'll give you the ring, you do the rest."

"Piece of cake, right?" Dean said. "Putting the devil back in the Cage."

"The prophecies can be read a couple of ways, Dean," Gabriel said. "Lucifer is already getting an inkling of that. He wants you dead. What does that tell you?"

"Tells me he doesn't have a sense of humour," Dean said lightly. Gabriel laughed.

"Yeah, well, no he doesn't, but aside from that," he said. "He's starting to get the feeling that things might not go down the way he's expecting them to."

"Because of me?" Dean said, his face expressionless.

"Because of you."

"I got dicked around by you and the god squad before the virus, Gabriel," Dean said slowly. "Told I was the great saviour and then got locked up so's I couldn't stop anything. Why should I believe anything you say now?"

"That was Raphael," Gabriel said. "He wants the Apocalypse, wants Lucifer to bring it all down."

"But you don't?"

"No. I like the status quo." The angel shrugged. "I like people, for the most part. I like you and your brother."

Gabriel looked up at the sky. "He's going to pull it back a bit, move the whole system south to keep the demons busy down in Missouri and the lower states. He had to make it look good enough for Lucifer. You'll have a chance to get out in a day or two."

"Yeah, well, I'll take it under advisement," Dean said sardonically.

Gabriel looked back at him. "There is one part of the prophecies that is unambiguous, Dean. 'The man who started it is the only one who can finish it.' That's clear. And that's you."

Dean didn't respond, and Gabriel vanished, the snow swirling for a moment in the place he'd been standing, then falling straight again.

"It's a trap, you know that, right?" Rufus said beside him, stamping his feet against the cold.

Dean turned away, lifting a hand to the guards on the wall, and heading back to the main house. "Yeah, I get that."

"We need to tell Bobby about those prophecies," Rufus said thoughtfully. "If they're ambiguous, maybe they can see a different way to read 'em."

Dean nodded distractedly. "Yeah, we'll see if the signal gets through."

They walked back through the snow, up the curving road to the big building.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Dean pulled up in front of the main building. _This isn't a good idea_, he thought to himself as he got out of the car. Whether it was or not remained to be seen. He hadn't been able to get Alex's words out of his head for the last night and day, and he couldn't leave it like that, knowing what he had to do, too afraid to do it.

He walked up the steps before he could talk himself out of it, going in through the front door, and pulling off his coat in the warm fug inside the house.

Renee came out of the hall that led down to the kitchen, smiling at him. "Didn't expect you today."

"I wanted to talk to Ben, if he's around?" Dean said awkwardly. The smile disappeared from her face as she nodded.

"He's up in his room." She laid a hand on his arm gently. "Dean, he's getting through it, but … be careful, okay. There's still a lot of confusion there."

Dean nodded and turned for the stairs, walking up slowly. _Play it by ear_, he told himself. _That's all you can do_.

Knocking on the door lightly, he opened it and stepped inside, hiding his reaction as he saw the flash of fear cross the boy's face when Ben looked up and saw him.

"Hey, Ben," Dean said quietly.

Ben nodded, tension visible in every part of him as he looked down at the book he'd been reading.

"I just wanted to see if … uh … you were okay?" Dean said, standing by the door. Clearly he wasn't, he thought, but what else was he supposed to say?

Ben nodded again, and Dean wondered if he should just leave, leave it for another day. He wasn't sure it would be any better no matter how long he left it. He walked slowly across the room, sitting down on the other bed. Ben sat up, moving back to the headboard, eyes still glued to the cover of the book he was holding tightly.

"Ben, Alex told me what you heard–" Dean started carefully.

"What Mom said, Dean," Ben cut him off, his gaze shifting abruptly to look at the man. "Was that true?"

"No," Dean said firmly. "No, it wasn't."

"But you didn't want to be with her, you didn't love her, did you?"

Dean let out his breath. "No, I didn't. It doesn't change –"

"So it was true. You didn't want to be with us, be a family," Ben said, his face stony. "You didn't want that on you."

"That had nothing to do with it, Ben," Dean said sharply. "I told your mom that I wanted to stay –"

"She knew that was a lie," Ben said, his voice rising as he got to his feet. "She knew you felt like she'd trapped you."

"That's not how it was, Ben."

"It's how she felt!" Ben yelled at him, throwing the book to the bed. "It's how you made her feel!"

"You don't believe that." Dean got to his feet, looking down at the boy. "I would've died for her, if there'd been any choice in it at all."

"She was herself, Dean." Ben stared at him, his eyes filling with tears. "I saw her eyes, she was herself and you pulled the trigger when she told you –"

"Ben, that's not how it happened." Dean looked away. "You know that. She was going for you."

"To protect me, from you," Ben said in a low voice. "I remember it, I was there."

"You were in shock."

"I remember it."

"No."

"If you'd cared about us, you would've found a way," Ben said suddenly. "You would've tried harder."

Dean shook his head. "I tried to protect you and your mom, Ben. And I failed, I know that. But I didn't want to kill her, and I didn't want her to die."

Ben turned away, walking to the window and looking out, his young voice filled with bitterness, the fight gone out of him. "Doesn't matter, does it? She's still dead."

Dean looked at him, his shoulders dropping in defeat.

* * *

He got into the car and started the engine, sitting in front of the wheel for a long moment, listening absently to the low, sweet rumble. The snow ploughs had cleared the roads around the camps, pushing up mountainous snow banks to either side. But elsewhere, it would probably be impossible to get through before the sun managed to get strong enough to thaw it. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out the necklace, lifting the silver chain over his head and tucking the medallion down his shirt, feeling it lying coldly against his skin.

Bobby, Jerome and the rest were snowed in well and truly in Lebanon, but they were going back through the prophecies, looking for anything that could be drawn from them, for Gabriel's assertions that there were other answers in them. The Boulder people had been split among the camps, and everyone was settling in, finding work to do, the leaders of the camps talking to each one, getting their skills and experience listed one by one. Alex was helping out Liev with that. There was nothing he had to do at this minute but wait. And he couldn't sit around waiting.

He rolled down the hill, turning to the gate as the gate guards opened it for him.

"You coming back up here this week, Dean? Still owe me a bottle for the game." Rona called down, and he nodded, waving to her.

As he hit the gravel of the road, he turned right, keeping his speed low until he was out of sight of the camp. Then he put his foot down and headed south and west.

Rufus, Boze, Emmett and Max, Maggie, Maurice … they'd all agreed it sounded like a trap. If it was, he'd have to spring it. Or maybe Death was just doing the devil's work and he'd be killed. Either way, it beat sitting around thinking about the people he'd failed, the deaths that lay on him, the promises he'd broken, taking his frustrations and anger out on the people working with him and screwing his way through the camps, leaving nothing behind him but more disappointment. If he could get through the snow, he'd be in Chicago in about two days.


	15. Chapter 15 Walking in the Shadow

**Chapter 15 Walking in the Shadow of the Valley**

* * *

_**Illinois**_

The Impala sped along the road, tyres gripping impossibly on the deep powder, leaving a rooster tail of snow and ice crystals spuming out behind it. He wasn't sure how it worked, but the medallion was having an effect, the car travelling over the top of the thick covering instead of ploughing through it somehow. Looking back when he slowed down, he could see the tracks of the wheels, a couple of inches deep, but no more.

He hadn't seen anything moving in the stillness and silence of the open country, the unseasonably early blizzard keeping everyone trapped inside whatever shelter they'd been able to find, or wiping out those who hadn't been so lucky … he didn't know. He'd been driving for a day and a half now, through daylight and night, the black car's lights visible from miles away as it lit up the reflective snow in front and to either side and nothing had come after him, nothing had stirred.

That silence, only broken by the engine and the slurring whisper of the tyres over the white road, had been unsettling for a while. Now, he found it soothing, as if he was alone in the world, no more responsibilities, no more people to worry about, just him and the car and the endless white roads and the deep silence, into which his thoughts fell, disappearing and leaving him empty and unemotional and uninvolved.

* * *

Dean drove into the outskirts of the town just before dark, the snow lit up in mauve and ghostly lavender, the shadows vague against the white ground, stretching out long and indistinctly. Slowing down, he cruised along the empty streets, looking around absently. He wasn't tired, exactly, and he could've kept going but something about the place was nagging at him, and he kept looking, flicking the lights on as night drew darkness around the buildings and the shadows turned from grey to indigo.

He saw them as he turned onto another cross-street, six men and two women, standing beside a couple of cars, arguing possibly, the headlights of the cars throwing their features into stark gold and black masks. He idled closer, smiling a little as he realised none of them was taking the slightest notice of the car's approach, the engine's deep throbbing inaudible as well, it seemed.

Stopping a few yards from them, he turned off the engine and got out, his headlights lighting them clearly, showing the black eyes, from corner to corner, gleaming oilily in the strong light. Demons, all of them, and all utterly unaware of him. Pulling the knife from the sheath on his belt he walked up to the nearest, a broad, heavy man with a shaved head, broken nose and close-cropped beard.

"He told us that Winchester was moving again," the man said angrily to the others. "We haven't been able to see him, and why are we're risking our necks anyway?"

_Good question_, Dean thought, lifting the knife and swinging it around, the blade driving deeply into the demon's neck, the meatsuit coruscating in a thousand shades of gold as the demon inside lit up and died, dropping to the snow.

In the faces of the others, Dean saw shock, confusion, fear and then panic as he watched them back away from the body, saw them looking up and down the street, looking for him, he realised with a spurt of dark satisfaction. _Well, successful field test of the Horseman's magic necklace_.

He strode over to the woman who was edging around her car, her head snapping to the left and right continuously as she tried to see everywhere at once. Stopping in front of her, he drove the knife up under the ribs and into her heart, and the light under her skin reflected over his as she died, falling slowly backward off the blade.

With the medallion, he could walk into Atlanta and get to Lucifer without any interference. The thought scythed through his mind, cutting through the silence and the detachment, filling him with a mix of undefined emotions, ideas, and behind them a wall of sudden rage.

"What the fuck!" One of the demons yelled, looking at the dead woman and turning fast in the powder, racing away.

Dean pulled the medallion out from under his shirt, lifting the necklace over his head. He didn't want them to run, didn't want to be the ghost that killed them without them knowing who it was. He tucked the necklace in his pocket and watched their expressions turn from terror to fury as they rushed him.

The knife swung and sliced, and he moved with it, following it almost, as the demons twitched and the light died out of them at his feet. He ducked a wild, heavy swing, arcing around, the blade stabbing into the back of another demon. Pivoting around behind it, four shots hit the wildly lit up body. He didn't know how he'd known the last demon had a gun, only that he _had_ known it, acting instinctively. Throwing the meatsuit at the shooter, he was right behind it, and the demon and body went down in the snow, Dean falling on top of them, the knife finding an opening as the demon's gun hand was trapped between its own chest and the body lying on top of it, light flooding up and out and dying to leave the street lit only by the headlights again.

Rolling off the bodies, he looked around, his gaze flicking disinterestedly over the corpses that littered the road. That was all of them. Still crouched, he wiped the blade through the snow and then on his jacket, slipping the clean blade back into the sheath. He pulled out the necklace and drew it back over his head, his heartbeat steadying, his breathing evening out again.

He walked back to the car and got in, starting the engine and reversing back up to find a navigable cross street. Killing them had been a release. From tensions he hadn't known he'd had. From the disappointment he felt in himself. From the fears that he couldn't acknowledge. He could've taken them out with the medallion on, but that would've been too easy.

Feeling a stickiness on his face, he wiped a hand across his cheek and looked at the blood smeared over the palm remotely. He'd wash it off when he got into the city, he thought.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Alex pushed open the cabin door and looked around. The rooms were empty and silent and she turned back to look at Rufus, shaking her head.

"No."

"Goddamned selfish, stupid, stubborn sonofabitch," the hunter muttered, turning sharply from the cabin. Pulling the door closed behind her, Alex followed him across the narrow porch and down the steps.

"Renee said he saw Ben yesterday morning," she said.

"Yeah, Rona was on the gate and she thought he was coming back here." Rufus rubbed a hand frustratedly over his jaw. "He just went the other way."

"You said he had the necklace, and the archangel, he said it would protect him?" she asked, hurrying to keep up with him.

"That's what he said," Rufus agreed sourly. "Whether it does or not, that's another question."

Gone to meet Death, Alex thought. That's what the others had said. The fourth Horseman, on the leash of the devil. Was it a suicide mission, as Rufus seemed to believe? She found that hard to credit. He could be reckless, she thought, but he'd never seemed deliberately suicidal to her. He didn't run, he'd said.

"He's made it out of bad situations before," she said, looking up at the man walking beside her.

"Yeah," Rufus agreed unwillingly. "But I get the feeling he might not want to make it out of this."

"He's not looking to die, Rufus," Alex said, trying to inject a certainty she didn't really feel into her voice. "He knows he's not finished."

He stopped and looked at her. "Do you really know him, Alex, or are you just a good guesser?"

At the intensity in his eyes, she dropped her gaze. "I don't know him, not in a real way."

Rufus looked down at her, brows drawn together. "What is it between the two of you?"

"Nothing," Alex said uncomfortably. An idea of him she had. Sometimes. Not always. Impressions. A feeling that she wouldn't, couldn't, look at. A tenuous connection that broke under the slightest strain. Nothing, really. "There's nothing."

"Not nothin'," Rufus said, half to himself as he turned away.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

"Bobby, Ellen," Jerome turned his chair and wheeled it to the bottom of the stairs. "Michel has found something."

Bobby raised a brow at Ellen, who got up and walked down the stairs. "Got a printout?"

"Coming through now," Jerome said, returning to the desk. "It's an older translation of the prophecy."

"How much older?" Ellen looked at the scanned document on the screen.

"Nearly five hundred years older," Jerome said, gesturing to the printer as it hummed and began to print. "It's in Aramaic, possibly the first transcription from the prophet."

Ellen walked to the printer and took off the sheets as they spewed out. "Bobby, how's your Aramaic?"

"Rusty," Bobby called back.

"Mine, however, is fluent," Jerome said testily, taking the sheets from her. "If you could push me up there?"

Ellen's mouth tucked in at one corner as she took hold of the handles of the wheelchair and pushed him up the ramp. "We're all ears."

"Let's see," Jerome said, pushing the reading glasses up his nose as he bent over the pages. "Fall of the dragon, yes, that was the First War, Michael casting Lucifer into the pit after he led the rebellion against Heaven … then a thousand years of suffering …"

"Been closer to five," Bobby said sourly.

"Well, a thousand was about as large a number as people habitually thought of in those days," Jerome said, looking up at him. "Time is usually inaccurate."

"This isn't just a prophecy," he said a moment later, pulling a notebook and pen closer. "This is a history, of sorts."

"The prophet was looking into Hell?" Ellen asked, a crease appearing between her brows.

"Lilith was cast down when she broke the covenant with the angels," Jerome muttered, writing as he read. "Lucifer tortured her into a demon. The first demon."

"We know all this, Jerome, cut to the chase," Bobby growled at him.

"The seals are placed on the Cage … only two men are suitable to break the first and last seals … and from different bloodlines but the same parents." He looked up at them, frowning. "That was supposed to be an impossibility."

Bobby shrugged. "Why?"

"The bloodlines are from the _Irin We-Qadishin_, the Watchers, the guardians," he said, looking up to see their incomprehension. "The angels who fell deliberately, before Lucifer rebelled. They were charged with teaching humanity. Some of them really became human, right down to the sins. Some kept their vows. There were twelve and they all had descendants. And their lines, the bloodlines of those angels are the only ones that are suitable for the vessels." He rubbed his temple. "The hunting families, the legacies, we all have the bloodlines from those twelve. The Winchesters are descended from the line of Araquiel. The Campbells from the line of Azazel."

"And John Winchester met Mary Campbell and they managed to create the only two men in the world who could possibly break the seals, and become the vessels?" Bobby extrapolated slowly, staring at him.

"Precisely. Coincidence, even Destiny, doesn't work like that, not without some serious meddling," Jerome said, his face becoming thoughtful. "We didn't dig deeply enough, into Henry's disappearance. Into Ed Landis' background. Into why Maeve moved to Lawrence to begin with."

"It's spilt milk, Jerome," Bobby said, pushing his cap back slightly as he leaned back in the chair. "What about the prophecy for the Second War?"

"When Lucifer rises, Heaven begins to break the Seals in preparation for the Apocalypse, the final battle on the fields of gold and …" he stopped, his brow furrowing as he leaned closer to the spidery cuneiform in front of him.

"And?" Ellen and Bobby asked together, impatience edging both their voices.

"… alright. This is where the prophecy is ambiguous. The wording is that the dragon will be freed from the earthly plane –"

"Lucifer thinks he'll return to Heaven," Bobby said abruptly.

"Yes, I think so," Jerome agreed. "But the phrasing can also mean he'll die, cut free from the earthly plane."

"How? How can anyone other than Michael kill him?" Ellen snapped.

"I don't know, it doesn't say that precisely," Jerome read through the rest. "But he's an angel. And angels can die."

"Who draws his power from the souls in Hell," Bobby added acidly. "Does that change what'll kill him? Does that level of corruption mean that he's susceptible to different things?"

"In a circle of flames that will kill or contain, the Dragon awaits the Dead God, the Black Lord of … I don't know what this word is …" Jerome stared at the page. "I need some help with this."

"A circle of flames?" Ellen looked at Bobby. "A spell?"

"Probably," Bobby said, scratching absently through his beard as he stared at the wall of books opposite him. "Fat chance of us finding it, if it's one of the angels'."

"Ellen, tell Michel to pass this on to the others. We need the most precise translation possible, and we need anything else they can find." Jerome looked up at her as she nodded and walked down the stairs, sitting at the computer and typing in the request to the other active chapters.

"We need to let Dean know that there's another way," Bobby said to Ackers in a low voice. "Before he figures his best chance is saying yes to Michael."

* * *

_**Chicago, Illinois**_

Dean walked through the torn and desolated remains of the city like a ghost, unseen, unheard, over the top of the deep snow drifts. He'd liked Chicago, when it had been a vibrant, living place, liked the brashness and energy of it, the slight edge of reckless lawlessness that underlined its wild beginnings, the mix of its inhabitants, the variety of its entertainment. Now, everywhere he looked, there was only ruin, the snow hiding the devastation to some extent, but fires burning here and there in the distance, buildings blackened and broken, their remaining walls like jagged teeth against the dull, grey sky, the twisted wreckage of the els a constant reminder that it would never, ever return to what it had been.

He saw the movements around him, croaties hunting in small packs, their eyes red but no longer filled with bloodlust as the virus had gone through its mutations; ghouls emerging cautiously, blinking in the wan light and disappearing back into the tombs of the buildings; a wraith near the river, disguised as a young woman, its true form shown in the few remaining reflective shards of a window behind it.

It's a big city, he told himself as he turned away from the river and kept walking. He'd left the car when the roads had become too much of a trap, filled with barricades of dead vehicles, with the mountainous piles of rubble from fallen buildings. He could walk around for days and not find the Horseman. Or perhaps, like everything else, Death couldn't see him with the medallion around his neck and resting against warm against his skin. He stopped in the street, looking around, and lifted it off, the metal disc and thin chain closed tightly in one hand, the bone handle of the knife in the other.

"Well, I'm here," he called out, pivoting slowly on his heel.

"Put the medallion back on, before that ridiculous bravado gets you killed," the voice, old and scratched and disdainful sounded behind him and he spun around.

A man stood there, a few yards from him, tall and thin and straight. Black hair receding from a high forehead and curling over the collar of the old-fashioned cadaver's suit, skin mottled and spotted stretched tightly over the bones. Dark eyes, hooded slightly and holding a trace of amusement stared back at him over a bony, hooked nose and thin-lipped mouth.

There was a rustle in the shadows of the building to his right, and Dean's head snapped around, seeing the croatie group watching him, spreading out to flank him as they crept closer. Glancing back at the man in front of him, he let the medallion drop from his hand, the chain falling straight and he put it back over his head.

The croaties stopped, blinking and looking around in perplexed annoyance. Vanished, right before their eyes, Dean thought.

"I thought you might not be able to see me, either," he told the man. The Horseman smiled thinly.

"No one can hide from Death, Dean," he said, gesturing to a building down the street. "That one is empty and more comfortable than speaking out here."

They walked in silence over the snow, ducking to enter the doorway that was buried to half its height with a snowdrift.

It had been a hotel, before, and to one side of the foyer, there was a small bar, with deep, comfortable sofas and chairs set around the room, bottles lined up in front of the mirror behind the polished wooden counter.

Death sat in an armchair, and Dean took the opposite one, a low table between them.

"You, uh, wanted to see me?"

"Lucifer has me bound and under his control," Death said, sitting upright in the chair and looking at him. "I couldn't come to you, I had to wait for an opportunity to let you to come to me."

Dean blinked as a bottle of whiskey and two glasses appeared on the table in front of him.

"I understand that you're looking for this?" Death said softly, holding out his hand. On the ring finger, a signet ring made of a silvery metal gleamed, the ring inset with a stone of milky white.

"Gabriel said that the four rings make a key to the Cage," Dean hedged, looking down at it.

"He is right," Death said. "And your brother holds the angel."

Dean frowned. "Is possessed by the angel."

"It's still Sam's body. And it still holds Sam's soul." Death picked up a glass, sipping at the inch of whiskey in it. Dean looked down to see the other glass filled as well although neither of them had touched the bottle.

"What you need to remember, Dean, is that all the power, in Heaven and in Hell, in the universe, comes from the human souls," Death told him quietly. "They hold more power than you can possibly imagine."

"What does that mean?"

Death leaned back in the chair, looking over the rim of the glass at him. "Forget the Bible, Dean. The old Testament was little more than an instruction manual on how to live in groups larger than a family tribe without killing themselves … forget the wording and think of the concepts." He sipped the whiskey. "God made everything, not in six days, or in any arbitrary, mathematical figure that mankind could grasp then or now. He is the Creator, the spark of Life, and he put that spark into only a single one of his creations. Humanity. He made the angels to serve him and to serve humanity, but they have no souls, no grip of imagination or conscience on their minds. And since the beginning, the souls would move on when their bodies died, to Heaven at first … and then after the First War, to the plane where Lucifer was imprisoned, where he mocked his Father by creating a mirror image of his home, but filled with pain and suffering, filled with torment and desolation and despair. Mirrored in every way he could create."

"Hell?" Dean looked at him. "Is a mirror-image of Heaven?"

Death smiled humourlessly. "Oh yes, from the deepest levels to those that are closest to this plane, it is a replica of the halls and the constructs. Even the cracks and fissures you know as gates are replicated, although Heaven has other defences and walls."

"The first human soul to go to Lucifer was Lilith, and I believe you know about her," he continued, lifting a brow slightly. Dean nodded.

"But each after her was twisted and deformed and deranged in the same way, the torture designed specifically to a purpose, to create Demonkind against the will of God, and to build a power-house for the demons and their masters to use."

"Their masters?"

"Those angels who Fell with Lucifer, of course."

Dean looked at his drink and tossed it down. "Of course."

Death tsk-tsked softly into his glass. "I don't have time for the full history lesson, Dean, go and do your own research."

"Right," Dean said, looking at the glass he'd just put down. It was full again. The bottle hadn't moved.

"Now, the world – just this small world – has pumped billions of souls through its short history. And those souls have gone up or down. And Lucifer's demons have whispered and tempted, have slipped out of the cracks and gates and walked among you, precipitating atrocity, making promises to individuals … to corporations … to governments. And with every century that passes, more of the souls are diverted to his power."

Dean felt a shiver trickle icily down his spine and Death nodded knowingly.

"Yes, the last century was a good example of the domino effect of his work."

"This is too big," Dean said quietly, picking up the full glass.

"No."

He looked at the entity sitting across from him. "What do you want from me?"

"I want you to do what is already in you to do, Dean," Death said, leaning forward, the dark eyes glittering in the hooded sockets of the skeletal face. "I want you to save Sam, and kill Lucifer."

"I don't know how to do that!"

"The source of their power is the souls. If an angel – or a demon – is cut off from that power, why, they're almost ordinary … almost human. As you have seen yourself, with your friend, Castiel."

Dean picked up the glass slowly. "Is there a way to cut Lucifer off from that power?"

"There is always a way," Death said. "There is a way to do anything you can imagine. That was the Creator's gift to you."

Dean scowled at him. "Don't any of you talk straight?"

"You're not stupid, you'll work it out," Death said sharply. "You will have six months, Dean, before the end game begins."

He slid the ring off his finger, holding it out toward Dean on the palm of his hand. "If you cannot find any other way, there is still the Cage."

Dean looked at the ring. "How am I supposed to get him back into it?"

"With a universal constant that Lucifer never considered, never imagined," Death said cryptically. "You'll –"

"– figure it out?" Dean shook his head, holding out his hand under the Horseman's. "You might be overestimating me."

"I'm not," Death said, turning his hand over, the ring dropping from his hand into Dean's. "Lucifer is filled with pride and arrogance. He considers humanity worthless and weak, purely because he has never experienced their potential. Even the prophecies were seen by men, not by angels. And destiny has many, many loopholes in its weavings, that can be seen by those who know to look for them."

Dean looked down at the ring in his hand. The stone was lit from inside, glowing softly.

"If you hadn't gone to Cicero, Ben Braedon would've died at the changeling mother's hands. His mother would've died from the constant feeding of the changeling," the entity told him. "If you hadn't returned for them when the virus was released, they both would've died of starvation in their home."

"Is there a point to this?"

"Don't roll your eyes at me, Dean, it's rude," the Horseman snapped. "The point is that Ben is still alive, due to you. Does he have a deeper role in destiny? Is that why you were appointed to keep him alive? Do you think anything you've done is coincidental?"

"I've been living on borrowed time since '06," Dean countered softly. "I should've died in Nebraska."

Death nodded. "The creature that you killed with electricity – yes. But you did not. Something … came up, as they say. And again, when your father sacrificed his soul for you. And when you were taken from a convent in Maryland. Do you think, for a moment, that any of those happened by chance?"

Looking away, Dean felt the weight of that. "I'm no one special."

"But you are," Death said gently. "Whether you choose to believe it or not, you stand on the axis of this world and it will be your action that determines whether the world is saved or destroyed."

Dean stared at him disbelievingly as the words hit him, sank into him.

"The world? No. No, that's … I can't … that's too fucking much!"

The weight of responsibility he already held was crushing him. How was he supposed to take this – how could he take any action knowing that failure meant everyone died?

"The load is the load, Dean," Death said, his eyes cool and his face expressionless. "I would've thought you'd have realised that by now. You've carried it this far. You do have help. You know that, don't you? Help and strength when you've needed it. But you're going to have to learn to ask for it, to accept it, to let it in."

"Lead the people who trust me to their deaths?" Dean said furiously. "Let more people down when I fail?"

"You will only fail if you give up." Death sipped his whiskey, looking at the man opposite speculatively. "Are you going to give up?"

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Alex rolled over in her bed, her feet thrashing in the tangle of covers that had bunched at the end, shivering with the cold air that goose-fleshed her arms.

_The marble hall was empty, she thought, looking around it. The circle was still on the floor, the thick, blood-drawn lines dried and rust-coloured now, Dean and the sword gone. She crept down the line of columns and stopped at a doorway at the end. The double doors were closed, their ornate golden handles gleaming in the faint silver light that flooded across the floor from the glass doors lining one wall._

_Reaching out, she pressed the closest down, surprised and afraid when the door opened easily, soundlessly. Beyond it, a huge circular room was lit by burning torches, held in brackets evenly spaced around the walls. The draught from the door made the flames flicker and jump and she stepped inside quickly, closing it silently behind her._

_A design of circles within circles had been drawn across the floor, and in one, a man stood, tall and skeletal and forbidding-looking, his head tipped back and his eyes closed. She stared at him nervously, wondering if he would sound an alarm if he realised she was standing there._

_There was another door on the other side of the room and she slipped around the curving walls to it, her eyes never leaving the motionless figure in the circles. The door opened as soundlessly as the first one and she looked into another vast hall, feeling her pulse flutter at the base of her throat._

_The hall was lined in marble, like the one on the other side of the circular room. At one end there was also a low dais with a huge, elaborately carved chair on it. The marble in this room was black, veined with gold. It held shadows so deep she couldn't see past them and every instinct she had told her to back away, to get out._

"_Hey."_

_Alex jumped, spinning around, her arm swinging out and knocking painfully against the column beside her._

"_I'm sorry," Sam stopped at the edge of the shadows. "I thought you could see me."_

_She shook her head, rubbing at her wrist. "I'm dreaming, how can you see me?"_

"_I don't know," Sam said. "Do you know who I am?"_

"_Sam Winchester," she said quietly. "The vessel of Lucifer."_

_He nodded. "Do you know my brother, Dean?"_

"_A little," she told him._

"_Can you see him, talk to him?" Sam asked, his gaze moving around hall. They both heard the soft whispers, directionless, barely on the edge of their hearing. "Get a message to him?"_

"_A message from his brother in my dream?" she asked him, shaking her head. "He won't believe it."_

"_Tell him I'm in Funky Town," Sam said, taking a step closer to her._

"_What?"_

"_It's a code, he'll know it."_

"_What's the message?"_

"_I can see some of what Lucifer thinks –" He stopped suddenly, closing his eyes. "Oh god, you have to run! Now!"_

"_What? Why?"_

"_He's coming, if he sees you – this isn't – it's not a normal dream – RUN!"_

_She turned for the door she'd come in through, bare feet slapping against the smooth, cold marble. The handle refused to move, and Alex felt her pulse jump in her throat as she turned around, eyes frantically searching for a way out. She could hear Sam's boots hitting the floor with a measured stride and she saw the glass doors down the length of the room, racing along the narrow aisle between the black, fluted columns and the wall for them, hearing the stride behind her increase its speed._

"_Who ARE YOU?!"_

_The thundering voice was not Sam's. The intonation, the timbre, the syntax were all different and she recognised the voice of the man who'd first seen her, standing next to the circle. She reached the glass paned door and dragged at the handle, hiccuping with relief as it turned in her hands and the door opened out onto the paved stone terrace. The stone was cold and rough beneath her feet, and she flew down the wide, shallow steps, feeling grass, springy and damp, her toes digging into it as she forced herself faster. Across the broad sweep of lawn, trees surrounded the gardens and her first thought was to hide in them, in the covering shadows until she could wake._

Wake_._

_It was a dream. Wake up, Alex, wake up now, she screamed at herself, hearing the wet thud of the boots on the grass, behind her, gaining on her, her lungs burning as she tried to go faster, risking a look behind, seeing the tall man in the white suit who wasn't Sam, wasn't a man at all, his face twisted in fury, his hand reaching out for her._

_The fingernail caught her upper arm as she threw herself forward into the trees, ripping across her skin like a razor blade. She hit an unseen log, the pain rocketing up from shin to knee, and cried out, arms pinwheeling wildly as she fell to the –_

– floor, her feet tangled in the covers, chest heaving as she tried to drag in more air, the muscles of her legs aching ferociously, her shins stinging and throbbing from hitting the log. Rolling over, she hissed at the pain in her arm, lifting her hand to touch the soreness, staring at her fingers as they came away wet and red.

She sat up, freeing her legs from the constricting linen, leaning over to hit the lamp switch, and looking down at herself.

On her arm, a long, diagonal cut was still bleeding, smeared across the skin where she'd touched the cut. She looked unwillingly down at her legs, seeing the reddened and grazed skin where she'd hit the log. Her hands were covered in dirt, her wrist still throbbing where it had connected with the column in the hall. Her feet were damp, dirt encrusted over the soles.

_It was just a dream._

Apparently not.

Pulling in a deep breath, she got to her feet, leaning on the edge. She had to tell someone.

_Rufus_. Whether he believed her or not, he was the only one she could tell.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

"He was the love of my life, Bobby, no one else ever came close," Ellen said, leaning on her elbows, her voice a little slurred, her eyes half-closed.

"I know," Bobby said, leaning back in his chair, his glass held at an angle, the liquid in it perfectly straight and almost at one edge. "It was the same with Karen, I just lost the heart to look at anyone else, after that."

"Why didn't John tell me the truth?" Ellen closed her eyes as she took another mouthful of the whiskey.

"He promised Bill," Bobby said, shaking his head. "He didn't tell me. It was in Jim's journal. He … he was so wasted when he got back to my place, and I couldn't even give him the five minutes to get his head together, stupid sonofabitch."

Ellen glanced up him, unsure if the last comment had been directed at John or the man who'd made it.

"I knew he'd fooled around on that trip down south, Bobby," she continued. "What I said to John …"

"Probably didn't hold a candle to what I said to him, Ellen," Bobby said, his face screwing up with the memory. "He took 'em away and I didn't see them until they were grown."

"I know," she said sadly. "Why is it so goddamned easy to fuck things up, and so goddamned hard to put them back together?"

"I don't know."

"I miss them, all of them, so much." She looked down into her glass and tipped it up, swallowing the fiery liquid and feeling it burn down her throat, warm her stomach.

"Me too, Ellen," Bobby said gently, picking up the bottle and pouring another shot into her glass. "Too many damned things I didn't do right, too many things I missed."

Jerome sat in the darkened doorway, watching and listening to them. They had lived the history that he'd barely brushed through, he thought. Known John as a hunter, known his sons growing up, growing into what they would become. They knew about the yellow-eyed demon. Had known what John had known about it, maybe.

He would need both of them to fill in the gaps in the histories, some day, if they made it through the end of the world.

He briefly considered joining them, rejecting the idea immediately as he looked at the oddly intimate space between them. They had their memories and their grief, and perhaps, at some point, they would recognise those shared burdens. Or perhaps not.

* * *

_**Chicago, Illinois**_

Death stood, brushing an invisible speck of lint from the immaculate suit. "Don't wear the medallion all the time," he said, looking at Dean. "It has some long-term side effects."

Dean's mouth twisted as he thought of what those might be.

"And stay out of the western states for the next couple of months," Death added, turning for the door.

"Why?"

"I have business there."

Huh. He didn't need to ask anything more. "How do I find you, if we need you?"

Death stopped in the doorway, turning around and smiling humourlessly at him. "You don't. I'll see you, Dean. And I'll send someone if it's needed."

Okay, Dean thought sourly, watching him walk out into the foyer of the hotel. He stepped after the Horseman, unsurprised when he saw the foyer was empty, as was the street outside.

His head hurt. Too much information and all of it about as clear as mud. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he'd been told everything he needed to know, but in pieces, and it was going to be up to him to put those pieces together. Somehow.

Just a billion or so lives resting on him, he thought bitterly, refusing to acknowledge the deep fissure of fear that was cracking through him at the thought. Maybe less after the virus, he wasn't sure. But all the people that were left. And that was plenty.

Walking along the dark snow-filled streets, he didn't even notice the inhabitants of the city, moving around, ignoring him as he ignored them. How was he supposed to cut Lucifer off from the power of the souls in Hell? How was he supposed to kill the devil without killing Sam? Or was that his big reward, killing his own brother to save everyone else?

He pushed the thoughts aside, looking up as he realised he was getting close to the car. He thought better when he wasn't actively pushing, and the drive back to Michigan would give him some new ideas. He hoped.

The Impala was waiting for him, parked in the rear of a garage, out of sight. He looked her over and unlocked the door, sliding into the seat and sitting there, the key in the ignition, his fingers resting on it.

He couldn't tell anyone about this, he realised. There was no help anyone could give him to do what he had to do, no matter what the Horseman claimed. And he could handle it on his own. He would do better on his own. No one else's life to endanger. No one to pay the price if he fucked up on the way. For a moment, he felt the full weight of it drop onto him. A monstrous weight, crushing him under it, alone and in a darkness he'd felt once before and still had nightmares, with the power to make him scream, about.

Closing his eyes, leaning his head against the wheel, he let in, let it roll over him. He'd learned a long time ago that it was better to accept the worst, than to try to pretend it didn't exist, or had never happened.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Rufus looked down at the long cut as he washed it out with salted water and iodine.

"And you got this in a dream?" he asked, his gaze flicking to Alex and back to the cut. "A dream about Sam?"

She nodded, looking across the room.

He looked down at the dirt on her hands, on her feet. She could've been sleepwalking, he thought. Fallen over, cut herself on something, gone back to her room, all the time asleep.

"It wasn't sleepwalking, Rufus. The bedroom was locked, the windows were locked. My feet wouldn't have been dirty, they'd have been frostbitten if I'd gone outside, here, barefoot." She looked at the floor.

_It was a point_, he thought carefully. Taping the dressing over the cut, he walked to the counter, pulling out a couple of plastic ziplock bags that Dr Sui kept in a drawer there. Returning to her, he scraped off a little of the dirt from her feet, from her hands, into the bags and sealed them. He wasn't sure what it would prove. Maybe it would be different-looking dirt than what was buried three feet under the snow here. He'd look in the morning.

"And Sam said he had a message for Dean?"

"He said he could see some of Lucifer's … memories, his thoughts, maybe," she said, face screwing up as she tried to remember exactly what he'd said, overlaid now by the memories of being chased, of being terrified.

Rufus shrugged. "Alright, suppose we start there – you have a dream of Sam, and he tells you he has a message for Dean. What kind of message?"

"He said I had to help him save Dean. He gave me a code to let Dean know it was him," she said. "I should've written it all down, as soon as I got out."

"Do you have the same dream, each time?"

"No." She shook her head. Rufus looked at the grazes on her shins. There were small splinters and particles of bark embedded in the skin. He turned and grabbed a pair of tweezers from the stainless cart, pulling them out carefully and dropping them into another of the bags. "It's different each time."

"How many?"

"This was the third," she said. "The first one, it was Lucifer, I think, not Sam. The second one, Sam could see me, in the dream. Lucifer could too but he kind of disappeared and Sam started talking."

"What was Lucifer doing, in the dreams?" Rufus looked down at her as she wiped off the dirt from her feet.

"He was …" she hesitated. The memories of the first dream, of the second were vivid and unfading. She didn't want to look at them, any of them, ever again. "… torturing Dean."

"And Sam told you it wasn't a normal dream?"

Alex nodded again, bending her head as she washed her hands. "I didn't know what he meant, until I started to run and I realised that I wasn't waking up, I kept trying to but it wasn't until I fell that I did."

"So," he said slowly, handing her a cup of hot, black coffee. "What's special about you, Alex? Why are you having the dreams?"

She shook her head. "There's nothing special about me. I don't know why this is happening. I'm absolutely ordinary, Rufus, ordinary upbringing, no childhood trauma … I've never had visions, or hunches or intuitions – I can't even get hypnotised."

He raised his brows at her, and she shrugged, turning away from him. "I tried it, to lose weight, before … all this," she said, colouring a little at the admission. "It didn't work."

Rufus nodded. There had to be something. She would talk about parts of her life readily, but the omissions were obvious due to the years they spanned. He would need to do some digging around. He knew where to start, but he was going to have to wait until the snow melted before he could go there.

"You gonna be okay to get some more sleep?" he asked her.

"No, I – I'll read for a while, do some work," she said, sipping the coffee. "Those dreams don't recur but there're others."

He gestured to the cabinets above the counters. "Kim's got some pretty good stuff in here."

Alex smiled and shook her head. "Renee gave me some. I can't take them, I can't shake the effects for a couple of days, and it's not a good time to be out of it."

"Alright," he said, his exhale quiet.

* * *

_**Indiana**_

Snow was melting, Dean thought remotely as he drove along the long concrete ribbon stretching out ahead of him to the east.

He wasn't tired or hungry or thirsty, wasn't happy or sad or bored or excited. He was empty. He was … quiescent. Waiting, it felt like. For what, he didn't know.

He should have been freaking out. He couldn't raise enough caring, interest … whatever you wanted to call it … to manage that. It nibbled at the edge of his consciousness, his awareness of that. Calm was one thing, dead to everything, that was another.

_Don't wear the medallion all the time_, Death had said, and he realised gradually that the lack of feeling, the lack of thought or interest was probably connected to the warm metal disc lying against the base of his neck. He slowed the car, stopping with a slight fishtail in the centre of the six lanes, and he pulled the necklace out of his shirt and over his head, dropping it on the seat beside him.

The day was brighter, and hunger and thirst hit him like twin hammers, his stomach knotting and his throat immediately as dry as desert sand.

_Sonofabitch. Side effects._

There was a small icebox in the back, and he twisted around, leaning over the back to pull out a bottle of water from it. The trickle of the icy water down his throat felt incredible, not quite, but almost as good as sex.

Along with thought and feeling, exhaustion crept in as he drove, until he could hardly keep his eyes open. He got off the interstate and cruised slowly along the county road, seeing the farmhouse after a couple of miles, small, dark and hopefully empty.

He cut the lights as he coasted down the slight slope to the house, pulling in around the side of the house, out of sight of the road. The efforts of the last four days, damped down by the necklace and in his face now, pounded at him as he picked the chain and medallion up from the seat and put it into his pocket, taking the shotgun, and getting out of the car. The check over the house was slow but thorough, his feet leaden as he walked through from basement to attic, laying down salt lines as he went.

In the living room, there was a long couch, and he dumped his gear bag next to it, not even pulling off his boots as he half-fell, half-sat, sleep dragging at him and pulling him deep.

_The mountains rose up around them, the sunshine bright and thin over the rough picnic table, barely warming but sharp in their eyes._

"_I know you don't trust me … and the thing is, I don't trust me either," Sam said sadly, looking at the table's splintered surface. "There's something in me. It scares me."_

_Watching his brother's face, Dean felt a stab of uncertain pain ripple through him. Whatever Sam was going through, he couldn't help with it, couldn't lay himself open again to the hurt that only his family could inflict. _

"_Take care of yourself."_

"_You too." He watched him get up, walk to the car, leaning in through the open rear window and pulling out his stuff. The driver of the pickup with the camper on the back nodded as Sam approached, and Dean watched him get into it, driving off._

_The weight had lifted, as soon as the pickup had disappeared from sight. The pain had remained but he was used to dealing with that, to shunting it aside, ignoring it, pretending it was something else. It was the weight that had been hurting more. And that had gone. Looking down at the ring in his hand, he'd wondered briefly what he was going to do now. Did it matter? Not really. He would hunt. He would stay out of Heaven's view. He would get his head clear and let time heal the rest and that would be enough._

_He blinked as the mountain rest area disappeared, and he was sitting in a bar, his hand curled around a tumbler of whiskey, an old song playing softly in the background. Looking into the mirror behind the bottles, he saw Sam walk toward him, take the seat next to him, elbows leaning on the smooth, polished surface of the counter._

"_Thought you were taking time off?" he said, feeling a trace of uneasiness at his brother's reappearance._

"_I have, Dean, it's been over a year," Sam said, lifting a hand to the bartender as she came toward them._

_Dean frowned. A year? No way. "It's been like, a day, Sam."_

_His brother shook his head. "No."_

_He took the bottle of beer the bartender passed him, lifting it and swallowing._

"_I tried, Dean, I really did. I stopped in Oklahoma and for a while I had a job, had a place, had the first tentative beginnings of a life that didn't include monsters and angels and demons," Sam said, turning his head to look at him. "Then I saw demon signs – Revelation signs – and I called Bobby and he sent some hunters and they forced the blood into me again."_

"_What?"_

"_I guess it was inevitable," Sam continued, ignoring the question. "I mean, you weren't there, I didn't have anyone watching my back."_

"_Sam, you were the one who wanted to step away," Dean said, feeling the accusation like a swift slash, a first cut, going deeply._

"_I know, I'm so sorry, Dean," Sam said tonelessly, looking down at his beer. "I'm so sorry for everything I did, sorry for everything that happened, and it doesn't mean a damn thing, all that sorrow."_

_Dean stared at him in confusion._

"_Once I had that first taste, in my mouth, inside of me, I couldn't stop, Dean. I started hunting again, and there were so many demons, and at first, I just sipped, you know, but after awhile, it wasn't enough." He looked up. "It wasn't nearly enough. That thirst, it kept on growing, and I couldn't even save them, couldn't save the people inside because I had to keep that thirst at a bearable level."_

"_Sam …"_

"_You weren't _there_, Dean," Sam snapped suddenly. "It was exactly like when you went to Hell and left me alone, left me to them, to the demons, to the war. I couldn't face myself."_

"_This is a dream," Dean said slowly, looking around at the bar. There was no one in it but the two of them. He looked back at his brother. "You're not Sam."_

_Sam smiled suddenly, leaning his head on his head, looking at him._

"_Right, Dean, but the story's still the same," Lucifer grinned at him. "I found Sammy in Detroit, and he'd been drinking and drinking, and he was strong enough for me. And you know what he said? He said 'yes'."_

"_You're a liar."_

"_No." Lucifer shrugged. "You know he said yes, because you've seen what happened next. The virus and the cities and the Horsemen."_

"_You tricked him, then," Dean said, his voice low._

_Lucifer shook his head. "Didn't need to, Dean. Sam was lost without you, lost and drowning in blood and he couldn't remember who he used to be, back when you were really brothers and you really had his back. He came to me."_

"_I don't believe that."_

_The devil shrugged. "It's not a prerequisite, what you believe, or don't, Dean. This is your fault, really. Sam could probably have held onto himself if he'd felt that one person believed in him, if he'd had the one person who'd always believed him."_

_The words cut into him and through him and the muscle at the point of his jaw jumped. He hadn't abandoned Sam. They'd agreed to go their separate ways._

"_Sam begged you to come get him, didn't he, Dean?" Lucifer continued, tapping his fingers against the hard surface of the bar counter, the staccato noise irritatingly loud in the silence. "He called you and begged and you turned him down, again. Happy on your own, no responsibilities for the little brother who'd finished what you started, let me loose in the world. No need to feel that tearing, bleeding guilt every time you looked at him."_

_Dean looked away, his fingers tightening on the glass. "I –"_

"_No, you couldn't," Lucifer cut him off. "We knew that, Sam and me, knew that you couldn't bear it. Couldn't handle it. Too weak. You were always too weak, Dean. You gave up your life, your soul, for him and when you got back, he was cuddled up with a demon and drinking her blood and well on his way to turning into a monster. And oh dear, when you finally accepted that you still loved him enough to put that aside for him, he went and chose her over you, drank that poor nurse deliberately and broke the last seal to my cage … I mean, sure, who could you blame you for feeling like Sam had gone? The brother you knew, the one you'd sworn to protect, he was irredeemably gone."_

_Lucifer smiled. "And you were finally free. The weight slid right off, didn't it, Dean?"_

"_That's not –"_

"_But it _is_ what happened," Lucifer overrode him. "You thought you would be safe, if Sam was looking after himself. You thought the world was safer, but that was just something you told yourself, to make it all seem … less like giving up and running, right?"_

"_He didn't have my back! He didn't care about me at all!" Dean yelled, his fist closing around the glass and shattering it, the splinters of glass driving deep into his hand and blood and whiskey spilling over the smooth, polished wood._

_Lucifer laughed. "And the truth shall set you free."_

_Dean stared at him, welcoming the fierce, bright pain in his hand, helping him control the fury that was rising – at Sam, at the fallen angel sitting next to him, at the father who'd left him with the choices and decisions that had all gone wrong, at … everything. _

"_He's not sorry anymore, Dean," Lucifer said, leaning toward him, his voice low and conspiratorial. "He's as glad to be free of you as you were to be free of him. He's revelling in the power he has with me, and he knows I'll never let him down, never leave him alone, never let him go."_

His indrawn breath was loud in the silence of the small, dark room, louder for a moment than the thunder of his blood in his ears, the booming of his heart against his ribs. Sitting up, Dean wiped his hand over his face, ignoring the fast shivers that were shaking him, holding down the emotions that surged and boiled inside.

* * *

_**Grand Rapids, Michigan**_

It was spying on her, Rufus thought as he stopped the truck in front of the building, turning off the engine and getting out. He picked up the shotgun from the seat and looked around cautiously. Snow was still piled here and there, in the shadows of the building where the sun couldn't reach, around and behind the cars piled along the kerbs. Most of the huge fall had gone, and the roads had been navigable, mainly just iced from the night's cold.

The truck held two hex bags, he had another two in his jacket pockets. Wouldn't hide him from monsters, or croaties, but it would keep him invisible to demon view. Unless, of course, he walked right into them.

He walked to the door of the building and pushed it open, the lock hanging to one side advising that he wasn't the first to have tried this one. Still, a newspaper office wasn't likely to have held anything that would keep a hungry creature here, he thought. Archives were on four, he noted from the board on the wall and he turned for the stairs, climbing steadily, every sense alert for sound, for movement, for anything at all that would tell him that the building wasn't as empty as it looked.

It was spying but it was necessary. He'd talked to Bobby and Jerome over the radio, describing what Alex had told him of the dreams, the injuries she'd gotten in them. Neither man had known what it meant, or how it was even possible. Jerome had waffled on for a bit on the possibility of self-inflicted injuries, but the cut on her arm couldn't have been made by her, it was at the back of the upper arm, she couldn't have reached around to do it to herself, not with its angle, or its depth. And the dirt he'd scraped off her feet and hands had been very different to the dark, loamy humus in the camp. It'd been red, soft and crumbly, filled with small granular pebbles. He'd seen dirt like that, down in the rich riverlands of the south. Not here.

The room he came into was long and wide, filled with filing cabinets and shelves, dim with shadows. Tucking the shotgun under his arm, he pulled out his flashlight and switched it on. Alex had been born in '82, he knew. A normal childhood meant that he was looking from at least 2000. He found the cabinet and started flicking through the editions.

Two hours later he found what he was looking for, in 2007. He pulled out the papers and set them onto the tops of the cabinets, reading through each report, tearing out all the ones that were relevant. There were a lot. The case had shocked the small city and had kept the papers busy for over two years. The articles stopped with the conclusion of the court case. He gathered up the stories he'd found, tucking them together into a bundle and putting it into his coat pocket, moving automatically as his thoughts reeled.

Trauma was there in plenty, he thought unhappily. Maybe that was what had opened the connection. He'd check with Jerome again.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean pulled up in front of the gate, the engine's idle a deep rumble as he watched the gate open wide enough for Jo and Rona to step through, both of them holding their rifles on him.

He watched as Rona stepped in front of the car and turned his head as Jo came alongside the door.

"Get out of the car, Dean," she said expressionlessly, her gun slung back over her shoulder by the strap, a bottle of water in one hand, a canister of salt and knife in the other.

He got out, rolling up his sleeve, taking the bottle she handed him and swallowing a mouthful of the water. She poured salt onto his hand and he licked it off, looking at her with a lifted brow.

"Any tequila to go with that?"

Jo didn't respond, keep her gaze on his arm until he held out. She cut lightly along the skin, watching the beads of blood seep out, and handed him a wrapped dressing, turning away and walking back inside the gate. He tossed the dressing into the car and got back in, easing the car through the opening as the gate rumbled all the way, stopping beside the blonde woman as it closed behind him.

"What's going on?" He looked up at her through the window.

She turned her head, mouth compressing. "I suppose we should be thankful that you came back," she said sharply.

He nodded, his jaw tightening a little, and took his foot off the brake, the heavy car rolling away, down the long drive.

So. At a guess, that had been the main rumour circulating, he thought bleakly. He'd taken off, left them to fight by themselves. He'd thought Jo would know better, but then he'd been wrong about that before.

As he reached the first line of cabins, he swerved off the drive and stopped the engine, getting out and heading through the trees to the angel's cabin. He needed answers and he needed them now, before he had to deal with the rest of the people in the camp.

Cas opened the door as he came onto the porch. "Hail, fearless leader."

Dean's eyes narrowed as he took in the lack of focus in the angel's eyes, the slight swaying as Cas hung onto the door. "You drunk, Cas?"

"As a … as a …" Cas closed his eyes, opening them again in a hurry as the swaying became more pronounced. "Yes."

"What's the occasion?"

"The utter pointlessness of caring about what happens now," the angel slurred slightly over the sibilants. "I didn't think you were coming back."

"Why?" Dean asked, pushing past him and looking around the cabin. Since Chuck had gone up to Tawas, the angel had lived here alone, and housekeeping had not been a big priority, Dean thought, taking in the chaos that filled the place.

"Because you wanted to die, and Death was waiting. In Chicago, wasn't it?" Cas asked, swinging around as he shut the door, stumbling over to the bed and half-sitting, half-falling onto it.

"That what you told everyone?" Dean asked him quietly. "That I wanted to die?"

"No." The angel shrugged. "Everyone had already come to that conclusion on their own."

"Uh huh." He looked around and tipped a pile of clothes off a chair and onto the floor. "Well, everyone was wrong."

"Good to hear it," Cas muttered, looking down at the floor. "What made you come back?"

"Because this is where I live," Dean offered him humourlessly. "I met with Death, he told me a lot of stuff. I came back."

Cas leaned forward, resting his head against his hands, elbows propped on his knees. "Why do you do this?"

"Do what?"

"Drink. Alcohol."

The angel's palpable misery surprised a smile out of him. "Usually I try not to get to the stage you're in now."

"I want to die."

"It'll pass," Dean said unsympathetically. "Death said that the angels and demons get their power from the souls, in Heaven or Hell."

"Yes."

"Is there anything you know of that can cut off an angel from that power?"

"Heaven can cut it off, to the lower ranked seraphim," Cas said, looking up at him unsteadily. "As you can see."

"Anything else, something that would cut off a really powerful angel?"

The angel closed his eyes, fingers pressing against his skull. Dean waited, curbing his impatience. He was personally familiar with the effort that even simple thought took when a hangover was particularly bad.

"Oleum Sanctum Jerusalem," Cas finally said, lifting his head gingerly.

Dean's brows lifted. "Am I supposed to know what that is?"

"Holy oil," Cas elaborated, rubbing his fingertips over his temple gently. "Very rare."

"Can we get it?"

"If we could get to Jerusalem, yes, possibly."

"Any other way?" Dean asked, his irritation seeping out.

Cas shook his head, stopping and groaning softly at pain the ill-thought-out movement brought to his aching head. "No."

"What does it do?"

"Holy oil traps angels. While the flame burns, no angel can touch it or pass through it – or they die."

"And it cuts them off from power of the souls?"

"Yes. From everything."

Dean looked at his friend. It was possible that the order might have it, in the store-rooms. Jerome had been insistent that the collection was extensive. If he could trap Lucifer, force him into releasing Sam … long shot, he told himself. But they'd had worse odds and somehow made it work.

He got up. "Ask Kim for some aspirin," he told the angel callously. "You'll survive."

Cas rolled his eyes up at him. "I'm glad you came back."

Dean shrugged. "I'm sorry you thought I wouldn't," he said, opening the door and walking out.

* * *

"She what?"

Rufus sighed and looked at the younger man. "She's having dreams of Sam – and Lucifer – but Sam is talking to her in them."

"How is that possible?" Dean asked uneasily. He'd come into the house, feeling the stares and hearing the whispers behind him as he'd walked down to Bobby's office, relieved when he'd found Rufus sitting there behind the desk and then the hunter had dropped his bombshell.

"I don't know," Rufus said with a shrug. "But when it happens, she seems to be really there."

"What do you mean?"

"She woke up with dirt on her feet, red dirt, not from around here, Dean," Rufus said, leaning forward across the desk. "Grazes on her legs from falling over a log, a cut on her arm from Lucifer."

"Where is she?" He needed to see that for himself, hear it for himself.

"Up at Tawas, helping out Renee," Rufus said. "She'll be back this afternoon."

"What did she say Sam said?" Dean dropped into the chair in front of the desk.

"She said he told her to tell you that he was in Funky Town," Rufus said, looking at him, seeing Dean's eyes widen suddenly. "I take it that means something to you?"

"Yeah, it's a code," Dean said softly. "Means we're in trouble."

"Well, there's an understatement," Rufus remarked. "She said he asked her to help him save you."

"From what?"

"He didn't get a chance to finish the message before Lucifer took over and started chasing her."

"Chasing her – where was this?"

"She said it was a big house, mansion, down south, she thought," Rufus said. "Could be Atlanta. She said it looked old, gothic, set in big grounds."

"And she goes there, somehow?"

"That's what it looks like," he agreed. "She's had three of these dreams. The first one it was just watching Lucifer, the second, she said Lucifer seemed to see her, and then it was Sam, and he could see her. The third one was Sam but Lucifer took over before he could tell her anything."

"And you've watched her? To see if she goes anywhere?" Dean asked, his mind leaping along several different paths at once.

"Last two nights now," Rufus confirmed. "Nothing, though."

"Why her?"

"No idea," Rufus said, a little more carefully. "Bobby and Jerome couldn't figure it either."

"Could we rig something up, a camera or something to watch her without having to be in the room?" Dean grimaced a little at the thought of spying on her while she was asleep and vulnerable. He wouldn't have agreed to it. When he slept he had no armour. It was why he didn't stay the night with the women he'd been with in camp.

"Already have," Rufus said, exhaling. "It was too weird to stay in there, she couldn't get to sleep, with me sitting there, much less dream. There's a camera feed to the room next to hers, Pattie and Monica moved up to the attic rooms."

* * *

"It's still creepy," Dean muttered as he watched the bed, Alex curled up under the covers, through the monitor. Rufus walked around the chairs and passed him a cup of black coffee.

"Yep."

Alex hadn't been able to add much more detail when she'd returned from Tawas. He'd seen her quickly hidden surprise at seeing him, when she'd walked into the office, and he'd seen the underlying fear, when she'd recounted what had happened in the dreams. When she'd lifted the dressing on her arm, and he'd seen the long cut, he'd understood it, a little anyway. Whatever this was, it wasn't like dreamwalking or anything any of them had ever heard of. It wasn't just happening in her mind, at least so far as they could tell.

It had to be an opportunity though, he thought, sipping the coffee as he watched the screen. If Sam could get free of the devil, even in small ways, maybe they could work out a way to get him free for good. Or at least get the intel that would make an attack work.

"I might not get another one for weeks," she'd said, three hours earlier, arms wrapped around herself self-consciously as she'd stood in her room in the sleeveless tee shirt and loose pants she wore to bed. "It was nearly two months between the first one and the second." She'd looked at Rufus. "You can't just watch me sleep for that long."

"No," Rufus had agreed. "We'll just have to hope that they get more frequent."

She'd ducked her head, but Dean had seen her involuntary flinch at that thought.

On the screen, Alex rolled over, one arm falling out to the side. They watched her moving restlessly, the covers shifting down with the kicking of her feet.

"Is this it?" Dean leaned close to the small screen.

"I don't think so," Rufus said uncertainly. "She said that sometimes the dreams started in the middle of a nightmare."

Dean glanced at him. They were torturing her, doing this, he thought unhappily. They should've been giving her sleeping pills or whatever to stop the damned dreams, not adding to the nightmares she already faced. He pushed the thought aside impatiently. They needed information and a lot of it, and if some of it came from a bit of lost sleep, it wasn't such a sacrifice on Alex's part, he told himself.

"Whoa," he said, looking at the screen. Alex had shoved the bed covers back to the foot of her bed with a strong kick and she lay in the centre of the double bed, her body twisted and frozen in a position that looked a lot like she was crouching … or hiding.

She straightened her legs, twisting over, and … vanished.

"What the –" Dean was on his feet, his chair overturned behind him as he hit the door and yanked it open, bursting into Alex's room a few seconds later.

The bed was empty, the covers in a tangled heap against the footboard. Rufus came in behind him, flipping on the overhead light. Walking to either side of the bed, they checked under it, in the closet, behind the armchair. Rufus looked at the windows, both were shut and locked, the curtains drawn and undisturbed.

"I guess that's why she's actually getting injured in these dreams," Rufus said slowly, looking around the room again.

Dean nodded. How the hell did she get back? If she was caught there, would she be able to wake herself and get back?


	16. Chapter 16 Noel

**Chapter 16 Noel**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

"What do we do?" Dean looked at Rufus.

"I don't know," Rufus said. "Wait, I guess."

Neither voiced the thought that was in both their minds. Dean sat on the edge of the bed, and Rufus walked over to the armchair, dropping into it. There wasn't anything else to say … or do … except wait.

* * *

Dean had no warning, no hint, no clue. One minute, he was sitting on the bed alone. The next, he felt the mattress dip and Alex was lying there, her scream shocking the two men into frozen immobility for a second, her arms swinging wildly as she fought against an unseen attacker.

"NO! JIMMY! NO!"

Dean rolled across the bed, ducking a swing and catching one arm, holding it down as Rufus threw himself across the space between the armchair and the bed and caught the other. Flattening himself over her, Dean shifted his hip as her knee shot up, taking him on the outside thigh.

"Alex! Wake up, you're back, wake up!" Rufus leaned over the side of the bed, his voice urgent against her ear.

"Alex, it's Dean, come on, wake up!" Dean grunted as the heel of her foot slammed awkwardly against the back of his knee. "You're back."

Her eyes flew open and she dragged in a whistling breath. Both men saw the stark terror in her face, the bright red marks that covered one side, scratches down her neck and forearms, her skin sticky with blood. Defensive wounds, Dean noted automatically. He eased his weight off her as her eyes regained focus, the pupils shrinking, her ragged, hitching struggle to get air slowing.

"Alex, you with us?" Rufus asked, his brows drawn tight together as he looked at the shredded remains of the singlet and loose pants she'd worn to bed. Claws or a blade, he thought, glimpsing the red skin beneath the tatters. When Dean moved off her, she wriggled higher in the bed, and a long rip in the sleeveless shirt gaped over her stomach. Dean saw thin lines there, blood soaking the edges of the tears in the shirt, and beneath the fresh cuts, a mass of fine, white scars, criss-crossing her skin.

"What –" he started to ask, when she hissed, arching away from the pillows. Rufus' eyes widened as he saw the blood stain behind her.

"Turn around," he snapped out and she twisted away from him. Four long, deep cuts had sliced through the back of the shirt, cutting into the skin and muscle beneath. All four were bleeding freely.

"What happened?" Dean let go of her wrist and looked at her. "Did you see Sam?"

Alex shook her head. "No, he wasn't there. Lucifer was waiting, in the first hall, there were others –" Her chest hitched again a little and he saw her hands curl up into fists in the sheet under her. "He pretended to be Sam but he wasn't, I could see it wasn't. I started to run, but the doors to the garden were all locked."

"The garden's the way out?" Rufus guessed, looking at her questioningly.

"I think so, I'm not sure. Once it was a door. Once I just woke up," she said uncertainly, looking down at her clothes and wrapping her arms around herself. "I don't know."

"I'll get Merrin," Rufus said tersely, getting off the bed and heading for the door.

Dean watched him go and looked back at Alex. "Did he know you were coming?"

"I think so," she said, her teeth starting to chatter. "I-I don't know h-h-how, but it was like an ambush. It w-was – there were too many of them, and the demons kept flying down."

He frowned at the image, looking at the razor-fine cuts over her arms and shoulders. "Is that what did these?"

She nodded. "I think it was Lucifer who did the ones on my back. He … changed … he didn't look like Sam anymore … not even like a man anymore."

Dean's eyes narrowed slightly. What the hell did that mean? He shunted the thought aside for the moment, his gaze moving over her slowly.

"And the knife wounds?" He looked at her abdomen, hidden partially by her arms. "One of them had a knife?"

"I think so. I don't remember exactly," she said, closing her eyes. Dean looked at her as she began to tremble. With pain or memory, he wondered? She hadn't been this shaken after the ghoul attack, or when they'd been cornered by demons …

Merrin followed Rufus into the room, muttering as she saw Alex. "What on earth happened to you?"

"Bad dream," Alex said, looking up at her as she pulled in a deep breath. Dean saw her jaw tighten, saw her deliberately push away her emotions and memories for the nurse.

"You two, out," Merrin said with a snap, putting the tray of dressings and instruments down on the end of the bed and going back to the door, waiting for them to leave. Dean and Rufus walked out, and the nurse closed it behind them.

* * *

"What the fuck?" Dean stopped a few feet from the closed door, turning around to look at Rufus.

"I don't know," Rufus said. "Think Sam gave the game away? Or Lucifer became aware of what was happening?"

"Maybe, but she – there were three different wound patterns on her, Rufus. I can't see Lucifer or the demons needing a knife when they were doing a pretty damned good job with the claws," Dean argued quietly. "And when she got back, she was screaming out someone's name. Jimmy. Was that a part of the dream, or had it turned into something else?"

Rufus looked away, shrugging. "No clue."

Dean looked at the closed door for a moment and turned away, heading for the stairs. Lost sleep. He'd thought that would be the cost of the chance to communicate with his brother. Not … not that. He stopped, Rufus almost running into him, and turned sharply.

"She tell you about her past?"

"No," Rufus said, stepping back. "Not really. Childhood stuff. Why?"

"Under those cuts, on her stomach, there were a lot of older scars, much older. A helluva lot of them," he said, brows drawing together as the memory returned clearly. "Short, like stab wounds."

Rufus sighed inwardly. "You think that's connected? To what's going on with the dreams?"

"I don't know." Dean shook his head reluctantly. "I can't see how."

* * *

He sat next to the SSB radio, headphones on. "You didn't see it, Bobby. She was gone, really gone. And then she came back, a bit under an hour later, but cut up, beaten … she said Lucifer was waiting for her, over."

"_We're going through the references as fast as we can, Dean_," Bobby's voice was familiar and scratchy in his ears. "_So far, it's not promising. There's nothing about actually being in a dream – and angels don't dream. What'd Cas say about it? Over_."

"He doesn't have any more idea than we do," Dean said. "He says his vessel is in some kind of suspended state when he's there. Over."

"_We'll keep digging, of course," Bobby said with a sigh. "But I don't know that we're gonna find anything. Over_."

"Alright. Listen, I need information on something else," Dean said tiredly, rubbing the corner of his eyes with two fingers as he tried to get his thoughts in order. "Oleum Sanctum Jerusalem. Over."

"_What's that? Over_."

"Holy oil, Cas says. Ask Jerome about it, specifically if the order has any in the storerooms. Over."

"_Wait a minute, over_," Bobby said.

Dean leaned on his elbow, glancing at his watch. It was already three a.m. Not that he wanted to sleep, but he was going to have to try and get some before dawn. Merrin had cleaned and dressed Alex's wounds, and had given her a couple of sleeping tablets, promising that they wouldn't let her dream. Maybe he should try one. He could use the rest.

"_Jerome's heard of it_," Bobby came back on. "_Says it's rare and he doesn't think the chapter here had any. He'll ask around the other active cells, see what they know – and we'll check the place from top to bottom. Can we have Cas for a few days? Over._"

"Yeah, we'll take off tomorrow. Over," he said, wincing inwardly at the thought of leaving again, but not sure how to get the angel to Kansas otherwise.

"_Send him with Maggie, Dean. Jerome wants to talk to her, and it would, uh, probably be better if you were around longer than a couple of days before you take off again. Over_."

Dean grimaced at the set. "You heard about that? Over."

"_In spades, son_," Bobby said sourly. "_People were worried. Over_."

"Yeah. Alright, Maggie and Cas'll be there in a couple of days. Over."

"_Dean, this thing with Alex, Sam and the dreams … we found references in the prophecies that might prove Sam right. Michael isn't the only way to stop Lucifer. Over_." Bobby said carefully.

Dean heard the hesitation in his voice and nodded. "Yeah, I know. Keep looking, Bobby. Over. Out."

"_We will. Out_."

Putting the mike back on the set, Dean leaned back in the chair, tipping his head back and closing his eyes for a moment. It looked like no one but Lucifer and Michael believed that Armageddon was the only answer any more. It should've made him feel better. It didn't. Too many people believed that he was going to come up with an answer that would save them all, and so far … he had nothing. Nothing concrete. Nothing he could move on, get going with. Again, he had the aggravating sense that the pieces were all there, floating around, he just needed to get them into the right order.

He opened his eyes and sat up, getting out of the chair and heading for the room behind the kitchen that had been commandeered by Dr Sui and Merrin. He needed to sleep. Didn't have to be a lot of sleep, but it had to be fucking dreamless.

* * *

_**Three weeks later**_

Dean stuck his head around the door, coming into the small room off the kitchen when he saw that Alex was sitting alone at the table.

"Hey, you doing anything right now?"

She looked up, brows lifted in query. "Nothing very important."

"You have to see this," he said cryptically. "Get your coat … and anything else you need to keep warm, it's cold out."

Alex followed him down the hall, pulling her coat off the overflowing rack beside the door, pulling out a knitted cap, gloves and scarf from the pockets and putting them on. It was seven o'clock and calling it _cold out_ was a common euphemism for _you'll freeze your ass off unless you're wrapped from head to foot_.

The swelling had gone down and the smaller cuts had scabbed over. The side of her face was again a beautifully mottled rainbow of blue, green and yellow as the bruising healed up. Merrin had cut out the few stitches she'd put into the biggest cuts on her back and they'd mostly closed up as well, the muscle and skin tender around them now, but no longer agonising with every incautious movement. Following Dean out onto the porch she saw the Impala sitting at the bottom of the stairs, the black paint gleaming under the outside lights.

"Where are we going?"

He didn't answer, walking down the steps and opening the passenger door. She sighed and got in, watching him as he closed the door and walked around the front of the car to the driver's side. The engine turned over with its familiar sweet, low rumble and they cruised up the driveway, Dean telling Malcolm that they were going to Tawas for a couple of hours. The gate guard lifted a brow and shrugged as the gate opened and the car rolled out of the compound.

Alex turned her head, watching the headlights light up the snow banks on her side of the road. She was sleeping, after a fashion. Taking the cocktail of painkillers and a quarter of the usual dosage of over-the-counter sleeping tablets Merrin had worked out for her and managing between six and seven hours a night, without the grogginess and disorientation that she'd had before. It'd helped. She wasn't dreaming.

The last real dream, as she thought of them, had shocked her deeply. She'd driven the memories of it as deeply as she could, refusing to think about it, to talk about it. Both Dean and Rufus had asked, gently, she guessed, for them, but the terror of being literally hunted by the devil, the demons and the man she'd thought she'd never have to see again had been more than she could face up to or relive. She'd given them the bare bones and turned away when they'd asked for details.

"Tawas?" she asked curiously, turning to look at him.

"Well, near enough," he said blandly, pushing a tape into the stereo and turning the volume down a little. Alex watched the road in front of them, the latest snowfall pushed to the sides, making it a little like a luminescent tunnel as the headlights lit up the white banks and reflected in diamond drops from the wet gravel.

Passing the turn off to Camp Tawas, Dean took the next one, following a curving road around the low hill that was the highest point in the area, and named, perhaps inevitably, Lookout Hill. From the top, it was possible to see all five camps, spaced out below, Lake Tawas and Lake Solitude, and the wide, long stretch of Lake Huron to the east. In the daytime, she amended to herself. At night, it was possible to see mostly blackness and pretend you were on the dark side of the moon. Or the inside of the whale's belly, as your preference took you.

The Impala pulled up on the crest. There was a small, fortified building there, but it wasn't in use at the moment. It was primarily a summer fort, to give advance warning of anyone approaching when almost everyone was out in the fields. In winter, it sat cold and empty, buffeted by the wind that was almost always present on the hill's rounded peak.

Dean opened his door, turning to grin at her over his shoulder. "Get out, you'll see in a minute."

She got out and shut the door, boots sliding on the slick surface of the wind-swept snow next to the car. He'd left the headlights on and she looked down at the ground, wincing as her foot slipped on a patch of ice she hadn't seen, pulling at the healing wounds on her back. She grabbed at the front panel and took a deep breath.

"Sorry, forgot how icy it is up here," he said, behind her, his arm going around her back low down where it wouldn't brush the scars. "Just a bit further."

They walked slowly over the crest, and Alex stopped, staring down at the wide valley below them, her mouth dropping open in astonishment.

The camps were clearly visible. All of them. Lit up like Christmas trees, in fact. Someone had been scavenging the lights – house lights, fairy lights, coloured lights – from miles around, and every single building in each of the five compounds had been wound around with them, some steady, others blinking or flashing, a gaudy display that reminded her so strongly of the homes in the normal towns at Christmas before the virus, it took her breath away.

"Where'd they find all the lights?" she asked, a little dazedly.

He grinned. "Discreet, huh?"

"It's beautiful," Alex said, shaking her head. "It's like it was before."

He nodded, looking down at the valley. He'd known she'd see it like that. Not quite a way back maybe, but more like a possibility for the future. A breath of hope despite everything they were facing.

He thought it'd been Max's idea, originally. An amazingly romantic idea for the taciturn and unsentimental hunting partner of Emmett, but one that had immediately taken hold of the people in all the camps. He'd only seen the valley by chance, coming up to check that the building had been shut up properly, that the storm hadn't done any damage, two evenings ago. It'd been snowing then and it hadn't had the same impact as a clear evening. He'd wanted to share it with someone. Someone who'd see it like he did.

Alex looked down, her gaze moving from camp to camp. They were little towns now. Full of all sorts of people, doing the best they could. There had to be some strange universal balance point, she thought distractedly, between too many and not enough. Despite the greater numbers, it seemed like everyone was actually getting along pretty well now, much better than they had when Emmett had arrived, with his boatload of survivors. Small enough to still know all the faces, big enough to not know everyone's business? It was hard to tell.

She looked at Dean's profile, barely outlined by the faint light reflected from the headlights on the snow behind them, from the distant ambient light in the valley. He looked … happy, she thought, with a flash of surprise. A momentary happiness, perhaps, but she hadn't seen him look like that before.

"Thanks," she said quietly. He glanced at her and shrugged.

"Thought you'd appreciate it." He pulled the collar of his coat a little higher as the wind teased around the car and trickled down his neck. "Cold enough to go now?"

"Yeah, passed that point five minutes ago," she said lightly, turning and checking her footing as she climbed back up to the car. Getting in as he walked back around the car, she wondered vaguely why he'd thought of her.

Dean got in and turned on the engine, pushing up the heat, a rattle sounding softly as the warm air blew through the vents. He didn't make a move to put the car into gear and head back and she looked at him quizzically.

"Something?"

"Question," he said, his expression uncertain.

"Sure."

"You were screaming out a name, when you came back," he said slowly. "Who's Jimmy?" He didn't look at her as he asked. He'd had the feeling Rufus had known, but the hunter had eyed him expressionlessly and lied straight to his face about that.

Alex drew in a breath, and let it out, staring out through the windshield. "He was my husband," she told him tonelessly.

"Was?"

"He's dead," she said.

"Sorry," Dean said, watching her and waiting. She looked like she was debating what to say, how much to say. A part of him didn't want to pry into her past like this. Another part needed to know.

"Don't be," she said finally. "I'm not."

He waited a while longer, but she didn't say any more. He was about to put the car in reverse and go when she spoke again, her voice lower, huskier, against the deep idle of the engine.

"I met him when I was twenty-four," she said slowly, as if she were feeling her way through the words. "Got married six months later. He seemed wonderful until we'd been married about four months. Then he got angry one night. And I woke up in hospital."

If she'd heard the low hiss of his indrawn breath, she didn't show it, staring fixedly through the windshield.

"You didn't leave him?" he couldn't help asking.

"Oh, I did," she said, her gaze straight ahead, looking into the night, or the past. "As soon as I got out of traction, I changed my name, changed states, changed towns."

He had the feeling that she wasn't finished, but the silence stretched out for a long time, Alex not moving, just staring out through the windshield. The dash lights outlined her profile, her expression fixed, her mouth trembling very slightly.

"I don't know how, maybe I wasn't as smart as I'd thought I was," she said very softly. "He found me, anyway."

"What happened?" He didn't want to ask it. Didn't want to know the answer.

"He brought a gun and a knife," she said and her voice became matter-of-fact, as if she were telling him something of no particular importance. "I had a baseball bat. He liked the look of that better. I killed him with his gun."

It left out a hell of a lot of detail, he thought, a shiver running up his spine as his imagination worked with what she'd given him, expanding, filling in the gaps.

"Alex."

"It was a while ago," she said, shaking her head slightly, brushing him off.

"You lied to me."

She looked at him then, turning her head. "Yeah."

"Why?"

"Because I didn't want that conversation to get side-tracked by what happened to me," she told him. He could see the plain truth of that in her face.

He nodded slowly, remembering the dim garage and the way he'd felt. "Don't lie to me again."

"Okay."

There was more, he knew. A lot more. But he didn't think she could handle any more right now, and he was pretty certain he couldn't. He put the car into gear and reversed back up to the lookout building, spinning the wheel as the taillights lit it up. Alex pushed the tape back in as he turned down the hill, Zeppelin's I album filling the car as he drove them back to Chitaqua.

* * *

"Am I actually going to have to find some mistletoe?"

Rufus looked around, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly as he saw Dominique standing behind him. She was tall, lean from the hard work they all did, arrestingly lovely even in the jeans and thick, handknitted jumper she was wore, an innate elegance carrying it off like designer wear. They'd talked a little, flirted a little, over the last two months, now and again. Mostly though, they'd both been too busy to pursue it.

"Depends on what you're after?" he said casually, inwardly astonished as the words came out of his mouth. He didn't even want to think about how long it'd been since he'd done this.

"I think you know what I'm after, Rufus Turner," she said, smiling up at him.

"Little on the old side for you, ain't I?"

"I like experience."

"In that case, you found the right man," Rufus grinned at her, enjoying himself.

Behind him, Dean rolled his eyes.

"She'll eat you alive," he told Rufus' back in a low voice. Rufus glanced over his shoulder.

"I could take that."

"And thank you for that brain-searing image," Dean replied, turning away.

* * *

Jo watched Dean walk across the room, half-listening to Ty who was sitting and talking beside her, to her, presumably.

"I was thinking we could ask Vincent if he had room for us," Ty said, watching her eyes track the man to the living room door. "Jo?"

"What?" She turned to look at him, replaying his last few words in her memory. "I thought you liked it here?"

"I do, but you know, South Farms is less established. We could make more of a mark there," he said.

"We?"

"Well, we're a pretty good team." He looked down at the floor. "We've worked together a lot."

"Yeah," she softened her tone. "We are a pretty good team. Still," she said, glancing back at the doorway. "You know that if we're working here, we get the action gigs, not just supply runs and guard duty."

He considered that. "I think we'd still get them. We're proven."

She smiled at him. "Any other reason for moving to a different camp?"

"Might take your mind off wanting things you can't have," he said sharply, seeing the flickering glance back to the door.

Jo turned slowly to look at him. "You want to clarify that, Ty?"

"You know what I mean, Jo," he said. "You going to keep hoping that's gonna change?"

"I don't know what you mean, actually," she said frostily, getting up. "And I'm pretty sure you don't either."

"Jo, come on," he said, getting to his feet and looking down at her. "Everyone knows."

She felt a flush of heat creeping up her chest at that thought. "Bullshit."

"It's not, Jo," he said. "And you know it. No one thinks less of you for it, it's just there're people who care –"

"Thanks for the advice, Ty," she cut him off, turning on her heel and walking away fast. _Pity_, she thought. Perfect, just what she needed. A more discomforting thought stole in. If everyone knew … that meant … she felt the heat climbing again and ducked her head, looking down at the floor. Maybe moving to South Farms was a good idea. Maybe it would solve a lot of problems.

She turned at the bottom of the stairs, and started up them. Insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result … Einstein had said it. The thought shot through her mind and she shook it off impatiently. She wasn't doing anything (_just waiting and wondering and hoping_) except her job. But maybe if she was further away (_he would notice and come looking for her_) things might feel different, she might be able (_to move on with her life and stop waiting_) to get things clearer.

By the time she reached her bedroom, she wasn't sure if she wanted to cry or pack her bags and go right that minute. She sank down on the bed and looked around. A bedroom in a house that wasn't hers, no relationship, nothing but the job and more time spent with Ty and Maurice and Vincent than with anyone else. What was she doing, really?

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Jerome sat in his wheelchair, looking at the tall tree that Aaron and Ted had wrestled in, decorated now by Ellen and the girls. He remembered the decorations. When his father had been alive, there had been a tree in here every year. After '58, when it had been just him, even later, when he'd found the others … he hadn't bothered. They'd been so busy, and the traditions that his father had followed had seemed trivial. And it was trivial, he supposed, looking at it now, making believe at the end of days. It still gave him a feeling that there was a reason for them to be doing what they were doing, searching for the answers, searching for a solution.

That was hope, he guessed. He turned his head, looking down the long tables of the library, at the heads bent over the books that were scattered across their polished surfaces. Not legacies, not yet at any rate. Just people who were determined to find something. And he knew the order's history well enough to know that was how it had been started. No rules or initiations or special anything. Just people, looking for answers, seeing patterns where others had not, writing them down, gathering, learning, teaching.

Dean Winchester was someone like that. The hunter should have been a legacy, but he wasn't interested in pure research, and Jerome suspected he didn't have the patience for it. His mind worked over multiple patterns, seeing connections in the doings of the present as much as what had been done in the past. He would only be happy if he could take action on something, Jerome considered slowly. Not just find answers, but apply them.

He didn't know the details of what had happened to the man. He knew the outline, knew what it had taken to break the first seal. But how much had that changed him? He'd learned a lot from Bobby, even from Ellen. Enough to know that Dean had been under the load of responsibility for most of his life. Enough to know that John Winchester had taught his eldest son the fundamentals of the warrior's way, life lived with honour, with loyalty and courage. Had taught him or shown him a moral code that could not be broken, that was riven through to the bone.

He'd thought, for a long time, that Henry's disappearance, his father's death and the deaths of the others that night, had been a mistake, a divergence of the lines. Now, he now longer believed that. John Winchester would have been a different man, brought up in this life as his father had expected him to be. Completely different. And his sons, the men who were the culminations of Heaven's careful breeding programs, would not have been who they were either. Destiny had directed their fates, but something else had been at work as well. Something that had ensured that each of the three men had had the experiences – the harsh and painful _lessons_ – necessary to become what they were.

He's still just a man, he told himself tiredly. Against angels and the powers of Heaven and those of Hell. _Don't kid yourself that it's all going to work out because there is still a plenty of room for failure_.

He looked back at the tree. There was, rationally he knew it. But he didn't feel it. He felt hope.

* * *

The pain was a snake, winding its way through his legs and up into his back and Bobby's breath whistled sharply through his teeth as he tensed against it.

"Bobby?" Ellen looked at him, her eyes narrowing as she saw the sweat beading on his face. "This has got to stop."

"Tell it to my legs," he ground out, exhaling loudly as the pain eased off and he slumped forward.

"Ellen?" Oliver stood in the doorway to the office, looking from her to Bobby hesitantly.

"Yes?"

"I …" He looked down for a moment, then back up at Bobby. "I don't mean to interfere in your business, but when did the pain start?"

Bobby stared at him. "About four months ago."

"And it's getting stronger? Affecting more of the nerves?"

He nodded slowly. "You a medic, kid?"

"No." Oliver said, gesturing diffidently. "My uncle was in a car accident. His legs were crushed."

"And?" Ellen said in a low voice.

"And they got better. Took a long time, but they did." Oliver held up the book in his hand. "I found this, in the apothecary library. I've marked the things that might help."

"Might help … what?" Bobby growled, looking at the book, not daring to let any emotion out of the locked box he kept them in.

"If you'd done something permanent," Oliver said carefully. "You wouldn't be feeling pain. There wouldn't be any change."

"You think he's healing?" Ellen shot a look at Bobby and back to Oliver. "Nerve damage doesn't heal."

"I don't know," Oliver said quickly. "But this has … recipes, I guess, for things that might help, if the nerves are forming new pathways, trying to reconnect. They do that, when there's some way around existing damage."

Ellen stood up and took the book from him, flipping it open and reading through the pages he'd marked. "Are the ingredients downstairs?"

"Yes, all of them," Oliver confirmed. "I just thought, it might help."

"I should've thought it myself," Ellen said with a flash of impatience, quickly hidden. "Thank you."

"No problem." He turned and walked away, down the hall and back to the library.

Ellen turned around slowly to look at Bobby. "No excuses now, Bobby Singer. We are going to try this."

Bobby looked up at her, nodding. Pride or no pride, if there was even a small chance, he would take it. Take it and run with it. He was too old to mess with the pain that was attacking him now.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Father Michael watched the children putting away their props and costumes, feeling quite satisfied with the morning's work. They would be ready for Christmas Eve, he decided.

In his old life, this wouldn't have been possible, he knew. Collaborating with Pastor Gideon, getting all the children together for a Christmas event. Laws, parents, liability … there'd been a million things to prevent such a thing from taking place. Or at least, to make it so difficult to do that many people simply wouldn't have wanted to do it. Here, those things had been cut away, and he and David had found Margaret, who in the old times had been a singer and had taught singing. Here, more than half the children in the camps were orphans. Here, people cared for each other again, and perhaps that was the most important thing, that there was caring and trust where there hadn't been for a long time.

"They have the voices of angels, don't they?" Margaret said quietly at his elbow and he turned, looking down at her with a smile.

"Yes, they sounded beautiful," he agreed readily. "Thanks to you, I might add."

"Oh no, I only show them how, they're the ones who sing," she said. "I'm heading back to Sable, I'll be back on Tuesday for the next rehearsal."

He nodded. "I'll see you then."

He watched her walk across the big room and pick up her coat and the huge bag she carried her music around in absently, thinking of all the other things he needed to prepare before Christmas Eve.

"Father?"

Ben stood behind him, and Father Michael turned around, brows lifting slightly as he took in the tense expression on the boy's face.

"Ben, what can I do for you?"

"Can I talk to you, please?" Ben's gaze dropped to his sneakers.

"Of course, any time," he said, looking around. "Shall we sit outside?"

The boy nodded, following him as he walked to the doors that led onto the rear porch. The day was bright and still, the fields and verges drab after the last snow, puddles of water still standing in the hollows and dips reflecting a clear, blue sky. It was very cold outside, but sunlight filled the porch, and in the protection of the corner of the porch, it was warm enough in their coats.

"What's troubling you?" Father Michael sat down on the long wooden settle against the wall, looking at Ben's face.

"I think I did something wrong," Ben said doubtfully.

"What kind of thing, Ben?"

Ben was silent for a few minutes, and Father Michael waited, watching the conflicting expressions on his face.

"I can't remember – I don't remember what happened anymore," Ben said finally, his face screwing up a little as he tried to explain. "I mean, what I remember, it isn't clear anymore."

Father Michael nodded, knowing what he was talking about. "It was a big shock, Ben. A horrifying event for you to witness. Sometimes, our minds try to protect us by making the memories vague, so that we don't keep reliving those moments, over and over."

Ben nodded. "Yeah, Alex told me that." He looked up at the priest. "But I told Dean – I told him I did remember, and that wasn't true."

_Ah_, Father Michael thought.

"You talked about it, the other day," Ben said slowly. "Um … it was being a false …"

"Bearing false witness?" Father Michael suggested. He'd discussed the ramifications of it in the last service.

"Yeah," Ben said, nodding unhappily. "I think I did that."

He looked up at Father Michael, his eyes wide. "I don't – I don't know why I did it."

_Tricky_, Father Michael thought. "When things happen, very bad things, we sometimes want to find someone to blame for them, sometimes that feeling is very strong, and we can't let go of our loss without finding someone to blame for it."

Ben sat beside him, his head bowed, staring down at his hands.

"Sometimes, of course, there is no one to blame. Accidents, for example, can happen, and the only one we can find to blame is God," Father Michael continued carefully. "Sometimes, we blame other people, even when we know in our hearts, that it wasn't their fault."

"My mom said that he wanted to kill her, so that he didn't have to be with us," Ben said, his voice almost a whisper.

"Do you think that was true, Ben?" Father Michael asked him.

"I – he didn't love her." He looked up, his expression torn. "He told me that."

Father Michael nodded. "Love isn't something that can be turned on or off, Ben. Even when you want to love someone, if it's not there, it can't be manufactured. And pretending to love someone, when you don't, that can be more hurtful. But do you believe that he wanted to kill her? Do you believe what your mother said?"

Ben exhaled, his chest rising and falling slowly. "I don't know. Dean said she was going to attack me. I thought … I thought she was trying to protect me, but now … I remember things different."

"Perhaps, as time goes by and you can accept what happened more easily, the memories will become clearer," Father Michael said softly. "Your mother was not herself, Ben. And we don't know, exactly, what the virus did to the people it infected. One man seemed perfectly himself, until he turned to attack the man beside him." He repressed a shudder at that memory. "Do you think you wanted to blame Dean because there was no one else to blame?"

"Yeah, maybe. I think I did." He closed his eyes. "I told him that it was his fault."

Father Michael sighed. It explained a lot of the man's behaviour in the last couple of months.

"Did you think how that might have felt to Dean, Ben?" he said, very gently. "To be blamed for something that he hadn't felt, had never wanted to do?"

Ben nodded miserably. "I was – I was angry, Father."

"I know," Father Michael said, sighing softly. "And I'm sure Dean knows that too. But when we hurt people, it helps to tell them you're sorry. Helps them. Helps you too."

"Will he be angry at me, Father?" Ben looked up at him. "For lying, trying to blame him?"

"I don't think so. He seems to me to be a good man." Father Michael looked down at his hands, clasped loosely in his lap. "I think that Dean understands when people are driven to do or to say things they don't mean. I think he'll understand how you felt."

"I miss her a lot, Father." Ben said softly, his eyes brightening. "Why does God do that? Let that happen to people who didn't do anything wrong?"

The priest smiled, a little ruefully. "Some people believe God is dead, Ben. Some people believe that He tests us, all the time. Some people believe that He doesn't give us burdens that we aren't capable of carrying," he said carefully. His faith had been tested in the past year, again and again. He saw the good, but the bad had remained as inexplicable as it ever had been.

"I don't know why He allows things to happen. Perhaps we are being tested. Perhaps it is because it is the harshest lessons that we seem to learn best, that we remember the longest. I don't believe He is spiteful, though. Or careless or malicious. I think there is a plan, just one that is too big, too long for us to see. I believe that all we can do, is the best that we can, in the span of the life allotted to us." He turned to looked at the boy. "Do you understand?"

"I think so," Ben said, drawing a deep breath into his lungs. "Do you think Mom went to Heaven?"

"I do, Ben," Father Michael said. "I think all innocent souls go to Heaven, no matter how they were taken from us."

* * *

_**Christmas Eve**_

The big hall had been decorated in tinsel and foil, twinkling, tiny fairy lights and … someone had come up with paper lanterns, the big, delicately-coloured balls hanging randomly from the ceiling. Alex looked around, smiling slightly. It was easy to forget the world outside in here, she thought. Easy to forget the devil and the demons and the monsters. She wondered if that was the idea, a little time-travel to what people seemed to be looking back on as some kind of golden age.

It'd been an easier time. But she baulked at the thought of remembering it all as perfect and wonderful and without problems. The world had had plenty of problems. Most of those had been wiped out by the virus that had solved the over-population problem in the most brutal way conceivable. Those problems had all been perceptual problems, anyway. The problems they faced now were significantly more real. The problems they faced now would kill you straight away if you didn't pay attention, if you weren't thinking and prepared.

"That's a remarkably cynical expression, Alex," Father Michael came up behind her and she turned around with a wry smile and a shrug.

"Didn't we lift your heart with the choir?"

"You did," she said to him. "They sang beautifully, and the production was amazing."

"Then what occasioned the grimace?"

"Nothing," she hedged, shaking her head. "I'm just hoping that we'll be able to keep this."

"Yeah," he said. "Well, we'll have faith that things go our way."

"That's your department," she pointed out. "My job, thankfully, is just to make sure everyone gets enough to eat."

"A full belly believes a lot more strongly than an empty one," he said with a smile. "So we'll work on it together."

They watched as the low stage at the end was cleared.

"Ben came to see me," he said to her, his voice dropping.

Alex looked up at him. "That's good, isn't it?"

"I think so," Father Michael said. "He felt bad about what he'd said to Dean."

She looked back at the stage. "If he can talk to him, it would make a big difference to Dean, I think."

"I thought so too," the priest agreed.

* * *

"So, when do we take a look at Atlanta?" Boze looked at Dean curiously, as they watched the people dancing and talking and eating in the hall from the doorway.

"When the weather lets us out," Dean said casually, leaning on the doorframe, the cold bottle of beer dangling from his fingers. "You in a rush, Boze?"

The hunter shrugged. "Can't make any plans with that hanging over us."

"Plans?" Dean straightened a little, looking at him questioningly.

"You know," Boze said, gesturing vaguely around the room. "We're pretty snug here now, man might like to think about family, kids …"

"You want to settle down and get married and have kids?" Dean couldn't keep the edge from his voice.

"Well, sure," the hunter said, his brow furrowing. "I'm thinking about it."

Dean felt his mouth curl up to one side, lifting his beer. "Not exactly the kind of life to make that a good idea?"

"Well, not right now," Boze said defensively. "But you know, once Lucifer's gone and things settle down, I can't see why not."

Dean coughed as the beer went down his airway. "Sure, once Lucifer's gone. Just like that?"

Boze laughed, slapping him on the back. "Oh hell, Dean, I got faith in you, man."

"Don't," Dean said, wiping his mouth. "We are a long way from being able to take on the devil, Boze." He tipped the bottle up, swallowing a mouthful and clearing his throat. "Besides, even if by some miracle we iced the sonofabitch, stayed alive and got back here, we're hunters. That's not gonna change. Or are you thinking of retiring and becoming a farmer?"

"No, hunter's good enough for me," Boze shrugged. "But this ain't the old world we're in now, Dean. No need to hide what we do, or pretend that monsters don't exist. Renee knows every single thing about me, knows what I've done. And I ain't the only one thinking about the future, Dean. Emmett, Vincent … they got ideas. Hell, even Rufus is rethinking spending the rest of his days alone."

He looked pointedly across the floor to the couples dancing in front of the stage, and Dean followed his gaze, seeing Rufus shuffling along, arms wrapped about Dominique.

"Who do you think these people are gonna look to, Dean, to keep 'em safe, even when the Apocalypse is over?" Boze said to him quietly. "We're all legit now."

Dean watched him walk away, threading through the crowds, talking to the people he passed. Legit? He frowned as he thought of that possibility. They didn't have to hide anymore, of course. Everyone in the camps knew them, knew what they did, followed the training and the classes that Cas and Chuck and Franklin and everyone else who knew anything about anything gave on a regular basis. Every child in the camps could load and shoot and clean their own guns by the time they were at least seven.

That had been when his father had taught Sam to shoot as well. For him, it'd been a year earlier.

He looked around the room more carefully, seeing most of the hunters there, talking to the civilians, mingling with the crowd. He hadn't noticed that they weren't really keeping to themselves any more. Was he kidding himself? Had they ever? He'd spent just as much time with Liev and Terry as he had with Emmett and Boze over the last few months.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

The fire was burning brightly in the small hearth in the bedroom, the air warm and still as Ellen lifted the pot of thick, bluish-coloured paste and scooped an amount out with her fingers.

"Arrggh!" Bobby's head snapped around as her hands touched his back. "Dammit, woman, your hands are like blocks of ice!"

"Stop your bitching and lie still," Ellen said, ignoring the furious look he gave her. "It'll warm up in a minute."

"That'll be a big help if I've already keeled over from shock," he grated, resting his head back on his arms and gritting his teeth as she smeared another load over his skin.

"Anyone'd think you're some kind of wussy girl, the way you carry on, Singer," she replied calmly, the corner of her mouth lifting as she slid a sideways glance at him.

"I'll show 'em the hair on my chest," he muttered. It was warming up, slowly. And her hands were firm against the aching muscles, dulling down the shooting pains he could still feel coming up through his legs and groin to his back.

He couldn't hope. Not now. Couldn't let himself think about it, or feel it. He had to stay tough because otherwise the disappointment would kill him, if none of this worked. If nothing changed.

Ellen worked the paste into his skin, pressing hard with a small, circular motion as she moved down his spine. The doctors had said that he'd managed to get the knife tip deep enough to nick the spinal cord. She wasn't so sure, thinking about the ragged-edged scar that lay halfway up his torso. Dean had told her that Bobby had been able to walk, into the hospital from the car, right after he'd stabbed himself. That didn't sound like he'd nicked anything with the knife, more like something else had happened after he'd gotten to the hospital. She couldn't let herself hope that whatever it had been, it was slowly undoing itself. The pain he was experiencing did fit with what she could find in the medical texts in the order's library, as expansive as the rest of the categories they kept here. But … no, not hope. Not yet.

As the paste worked in, Bobby felt a heat sinking through his skin and into his muscles, through sinew and down to his bones. He moved to one side carefully, lifting shoulder and rib cage, feeling the pull of the muscles down the length of his spine. There was a twinge, but that was all. That same movement, incautiously reaching for a book on the table two hours ago had set off firecrackers of agony before. He returned to the flat, even position he'd been in, eyes closed, his heart beat a little faster. No hope. Don't hope yet.

"Okay, Singer, I'm going to roll you over. You need to tell me where to put this stuff on your legs," Ellen said, a minute or an hour later, he couldn't tell. He nodded and felt her hands gently push him, holding him on his side as she straightened the sheet under him, then let him down on his back.

"Anything? Pain?" She looked at him carefully and he shook his head. His back felt hot, the muscles loose and heavy.

"Good," she said, picking up the pot. "Now, where do I put this?"

Bobby rolled his eyes slightly. Despite Ellen's deliberately pragmatic manner, he still felt exposed, vulnerable in a way that he hadn't been since he'd been a much, much younger man.

"Uh … starts at the knees, usually," he hedged. "Ends up past the hips, both sides."

"Right."

He closed his eyes as she worked the paste along the inside of the leg, following the artery and nerve paths. Six months ago he hadn't felt anything through the skin of his legs. He'd had to check himself every single day, make sure he hadn't gotten a scrape or a cut, something that could become infected because he wouldn't've known it was there. Now, he could feel her hands, feel the fingertips, feel the soft pull of the ointment against the hairs, differentiate between the warmth of her skin and the cool, slightly greasy feel of the paste.

Dammit, don't think about that, he told himself, his face screwing up a little. Don't think about it until there's something really different.

Ellen tried to remember exactly how blood and the nervous system branched around the top of the legs. The groin was, of course, filled with nerve endings, but she wasn't sure those were the problem. She lightened her touch a little, working in smaller circles as she reached the curving hollow where hip joined thigh. Under her fingers, a muscle jumped and her gaze flew to Bobby's face.

"Did you feel that?"

He nodded sheepishly. "Tickled."

"Your muscles responded, Bobby!" Ellen said, looking down where her fingers were lying on the smooth, pale skin.

"Yeah, you're too light –" he started to say, then stopped, looking at her, the meaning finally sinking in. "It moved?"

"Jumped under my hand," she confirmed, her voice a little deeper.

They looked at each other for a long moment, both thinking the same thing, neither ready to acknowledge it. Ellen dropped her gaze to his hip and scooped out another load of paste, working it in along the rise of his hip, a little more firmly.

Tickled. He remembered the sensation. He'd always been a bit ticklish there, Karen had delighted in it. That memory brought a line of red and a flush of heat to his face and he closed his eyes.

Feeling. Again. But no hope. Not yet.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

The band was a mismatched group. To look at them separately, it was easy to assume they would have nothing in common. Of course, they did. They had the music.

The pianist was Bernice Phelps, a forty-two year old housewife from Philadelphia with the last of a blonde permanent rinse growing out of her shoulder-length chestnut brown hair. She'd played all her life but had thrown out her dreams of becoming a singer when she'd gotten pregnant to the college quarterback at nineteen. She could sing anything, a double-octave range, but her preference was smoky blues and when she sang, if you closed your eyes, you could imagine the dark New Orleans club, the taste of margaritas on your tongue, warm air that felt like silk on your skin and an insidious arousal that the velvety voice stirred, just in hearing it.

Frank Pincott played the drums. Frank had done two tours in Afghanistan before a mine sent him home with one leg. He had a prosthetic attached at mid-thigh on the other. Frank was twenty-eight, and he loved music – any kind of music, all kinds of music. Didn't matter if it was classical or country or heavy metal or soul, he could find the beat and he could keep it.

Murray Anderson, sixty-three, had a horn. The brassy notes lifted above the other instruments when he did his solos and blended seamlessly when he played the chorus. He'd been a tractor salesman in Iowa before the virus, and he'd been in a band in the little town that he'd been born in and stayed in, seven of them, his friends reaching back to high school. He was the only one of them that had survived, and sometimes, his horn wept for them, in the middle of a song.

Adrienne Whalan was twenty-two years old. She played pretty much anything with strings, a Juilliard major in classical music when the virus had struck. She'd managed to escape the city but had been captured on the highway, starving, desperate and still carrying the cello and violin cases that were the only things she'd thought to take with her. Long, straight, orangey-red hair was braided into a tight coronet around her head as she lifted her bow, the Stradivarius that Emmett had retrieved when he'd hit the demon camp, lilting out perfect notes as she ad-libbed a descant to the popular song the band was playing.

Rudy Massey was the only one there who looked like a rock musician, Alex thought, watching him play the twelve-string with the dexterity of a spider. He already had his groupies, the front of the low stage lined with girls ranging from eleven to their mid-twenties, and a few who were older than that, wearing identical expressions of dreamy-eyed contentment as they drank him in. He was thirty, Alex knew, with long, black hair and high, wide cheekbones, dark brown eyes that could look as soulful as a Spaniel or crease up with boyish charm, and a wide, full mouth that drew every one of the dreamy stares when he sang. He had a good voice, but his mastery was the guitar. She'd met him when he'd begged to go along on a supply run to Grand Rapids, his passionate explanation being the guitar store on Twenty-Ninth that had a full range of every type of guitar conceivable. She'd given in to the passion and his charm and Rufus had complained the entire four hours back about the space taken up by the six guitars Rudy had chosen.

Despite the fact they'd only been playing together for a few weeks, they were good, she thought. They were, in their own way, like the hunters, each bringing specific and essential skills but merging harmoniously, no egos, none of them attempting to hog the limelight or showboat themselves. Was that a side effect of a life lived for one thing, so dedicatedly that it didn't matter what anyone thought, only what they did?

The song switched to a slow one, and she smiled as Rudy gestured to Dominique to come up and sing with them, the crowd on the floor pushing her forward. She couldn't hear the woman's protests, but she could see Rufus' face, glowing a little with pride as she finally gave in and stepped up beside Rudy, taking the microphone. She had a deep voice, contralto perhaps, powerful and clear but with its own rich sweetness. The song they played was an old one, well-known but with an original arrangement that eased the pain and melancholy, lightening the dark lyrics.

Looking at the dancers, she saw Dave. He was dancing with Helen, one of the group rescued from Boulder. She remembered meeting her when they'd been taking down the group's skills and experiences. Despite the ordeal of walking the last three miles to sanctuary in the snow, Helen had been calm and pragmatic. Alex had gotten a strong sense that she had a strength that was just beginning to blossom in the hardships of this life, maybe a strength that she hadn't known she'd had in her life before.

Watching his face, she was glad that he'd found someone who could actually give him what he wanted, what he needed. The sight brought a small pang of loss, and she knew that wasn't because of him, only a moment of self-pity because she wouldn't have what he'd found.

"I thought you and Dave had a thing," Dean's voice said beside her, and she looked around to see him watching Dave and Helen dancing as well. She shook her head.

"No."

He glanced at her, brow creased slightly. "Didn't work out?"

"Didn't get started," she said lightly. She thought for a moment that he was going to argue with her, but he looked away, shoulder shifting in what might have been a shrug.

"Things changed a lot in one year," he said, gesturing vaguely around the room.

Alex smiled, remembering last Christmas at Chitaqua. "Yeah, I guess people try make things as familiar as possible no matter what the circumstances."

"Is that a good thing?" he asked her, looking around uncomfortably. "I mean, this could all be gone if anyone notices us here."

She knew what he meant. "They aren't hunters, they don't have your instincts. But when you need them, need them to fight, they'll fight for this, for the memory of it and the feel of it and the need for it."

He turned and looked at her thoughtfully. He hadn't thought about that, about what these people might fight for. Their lives, he'd assumed. But if life was living in a cave, living hand to mouth for too long, would those lives be worth fighting for?

"What else? What else will they fight for?"

She looked away. "The same things you fight for. Protecting their families, each other. For their homes and their freedom, I guess. For a life worth living."

"Is that what this is?" he asked. "It's a long way from what they had."

"Most of what we had wasn't worth fighting for," Alex said with a shrug. "Mountains of debt, insecurity, the latest whatever, tension in the world, six hundred channels of TV … that was all … I don't know, distractions, I guess. The real stuff hasn't changed. And people need people. Most people. Need a real connection to another person, not a thousand friends on some computer site or whatever it was that was taking over from community and real life."

"You don't think they want all that back?" he asked, smiling cynically at her.

She glanced at him, catching the smile. "I don't know. Maybe, it was an easier life, but you know, I wonder how many of these people would go back now. How many of them would say that this – what we do here every day – makes them feel things again, really feel things, instead of just the vague and foggy feelings about nothing in particular they'd had in the old life."

Dean shook his head. "Yeah, too deep for me. Feelings are overrated anyway."

"You don't mean that."

"Oh, yeah, I do," he said, the sudden vehemence in his voice surprising her. He looked away and she saw tension in the line of his shoulders, his defences up, saw his withdrawal.

It happened like that frequently, more often than not, actually. He didn't trust her, and she couldn't take that personally, she had the feeling he didn't really trust anyone. Perhaps not even Rufus or Bobby, although she wasn't sure why she thought that. It hadn't been in anything he'd said or done. Perhaps more in what he hadn't.

The hall seemed abruptly too crowded, too noisy. Time to leave.

"Well … Merry Christmas," she said lightly, turning away.

Dean looked down at the floor, the sudden anger peaking and vanishing as he swore at himself. He turned around, seeing her walking away to the doors, and forced himself to move.

"Alex, wait a second," he said, walking faster.

She'd stopped beside the front door, pulling on her coat, wrapping her scarf around her neck.

"You get a ride here?" he asked, walking up next to her.

She nodded. "Someone'll be heading back."

"I'll take you."

"That's okay," she said, looking down as she pulled on her gloves.

"No, I've had enough festivity to last me a while," he told her, trying to lighten the uncomfortable tension between them. "My brother says I'm anti-social anyway."

She flicked a glance at him, and he gave her a one-sided, slightly rueful smile, wondering what the hell had prompted that odd disclosure. He grabbed his coat and dragged it on. They went out and down the porch steps in silence, walking along the slush-filled road to the car.

Opening the door for her, closing it again when she was in, walking around the car to the other side, he struggled to find something to talk about, anything to talk about. Silence normally didn't worry him and he knew it didn't worry her, but this silence felt thick and uncomfortable, full of unspoken thoughts that were too damned loud.

He got in and turned the key, pulling out and driving slowly between the lines of vehicles that filled either side of the road. Duncan and Michael were on gate duty, and both looked frozen and miserable as they waved down and opened the gate. Driving through, he glanced in the rear view mirror automatically as they cleared the gate, watching it close behind them, his throat feeling as if it was packed with concrete.

The night sky was brilliant with stars and the headlights lit up the road, ice patches glistening. Boze's comments came back to him and he wondered distractedly if the hunter could be right, if they could have a semblance of normal life now. He frowned as he realised he'd already had it … he'd been living with Lisa, had given his commitment to the family he'd thought he'd have … what was the difference?

"What did you want to do with this place, when you bought it?" The question came out on its own, as far from the thoughts of normality as he could find. He wondered if she'd tell him the truth, or if he'd wrecked that with his earlier anger.

"I –" she hesitated for a long moment, then drew in a breath. "I told myself I was going to turn it into a camp for city kids, the ones who couldn't get out of their lives normally. But I don't know that I would've actually done that, now."

"Why not?"

"Because what I really wanted was to get away from my old life," she said, looking out the passenger window at the darkness outside. "I wanted to hide."

"End of the world screwed up that idea," he said.

"Yeah," she agreed.

"You wish it could go back to what it was?" he asked, glancing over at her.

"No." She sighed softly. "No, as frightening and as dangerous as this life can be, I'm not hiding anymore, so for me, it's better." She looked at him. "I mean, it's not like I can do what you do, I can't go in and really save people, but I can do some things that are a lot more meaningful than what I would have been doing."

He scowled at the road, uncomfortable with her assertion of the importance of what he'd done. "My life isn't what it looks like, Alex."

It came out more harshly than he'd intended, and she was silent and he wondered bleakly if he would ever be able to talk to her, to anyone, without the reactions that seemed to lash out of him, out of his control. He was surprised when he felt her turn back to him.

"Did you always hate it so much? Being a hunter?"

As questions went, it shouldn't have been difficult to answer. But he hesitated, not sure now that he wanted to tell the truth. It was personal. It would tell her something about him.

"No," he answered finally, pulling in to the Chitaqua gate. Risa stood by the gate as Pete opened it from the tower, peering in at them. Dean drove through, barely noticing them, lifting a hand from the wheel absently.

No. He hadn't always hated it. Growing up, he'd embraced the life, the importance of it, even when he'd been drowning in his own fears of not being good enough, strong enough, brave enough. Not being able to protect his father and brother. He'd still loved it. Loved the use of mind and body and skill. Loved the knowledge that what he was doing was killing the things that hunted down innocent people. Loved the security of his family around him, all of them isolated from the real world, by what they did, by the meaning of it.

He let the car roll down the curving road. "When I was a kid, I loved it – mostly."

"Mostly?"

He shrugged. "It was hard, and we spent a lot of time in emergency rooms and hospital beds."

The main house appeared, the outside lights shining down on the road and he pulled over next to the steps, leaving the engine running. "But we had some people, my Dad's friends … they were more than friends to me and Sam, they were our family."

Alex looked reluctantly at the house. She wasn't sure why he was talking to her now, really talking, about himself, about his life. She didn't want to leave him, while he was doing it. She pulled her gloves back on slowly, hoping he'd continue, make an excuse or give her a reason not to just get out of the car and go up to her room.

Catching the movement, Dean tensed as he realised he didn't want to stop talking to her. Not now. He wasn't sure if it was the need to get it out, to clarify it for himself, or if it was because he wanted the woman beside him to understand this stuff, this stuff about him. He put out a hand, fingers curling around her arm as she opened the door.

She turned to look at him, meeting his eyes in the darkness of the car. The mute expression in them told her that he didn't want her to go. But he wouldn't ask. Couldn't ask her to stay, to listen, to talk. She looked through the windshield uncertainly for a moment, then pulled the door shut.

He let go of her arm and put the car in gear, driving down to the end of the gravelled road and stopping, the silence loud as he turned the key and the engine died.

They got out and Dean heard her following him along the path. He opened the cabin door, and went to the hearth, listening for her as she closed the door behind them. As he lit the fire laid there, he heard her move across the floor, find the chair, sit down. Between them, there was a tension again. This wasn't just drifting into a conversation and going along with it. He'd asked, not out loud but he'd still asked. And she was here because of that. It made it too important, too deliberate, and he didn't know how to break through it.

"What was it like? Growing up like that?" she asked him quietly, when the flames were licking at the kindling. He straightened up, walking to the armchair opposite her and dropping into it, watching the fire, thinking about how to answer her questions.

He was aware of how nervous he felt, actually talking to someone about his life. Telling them things that explained him, some of him. It came to him slowly that he'd been wanting to do this for a long time. There just hadn't been anyone who'd seen it.

"I don't know … weird?" he suggested, looking at the fire. "It was my Dad, and Sam and me. He'd drop us off at Bobby's sometimes, sometimes with Jim Murphy or Caleb. They probably spent as much time raising us as Dad did. When I was fifteen, he had a fight with Bobby, so we didn't see him anymore, but we spent more time with Jim and Caleb, stayed with them, learned stuff from them, hunted with them. I hunted with them. I learned to shoot when I was six, and I took down a werewolf at sixteen." His gaze flickered to her, looking for her reaction to that. She was watching him, her expression interested, not alarmed or … disbelieving.

"It was normal, I guess, for me," he continued, thinking about it now, his memories close around him. "Sam hated it. Not all the time, but he hated that we were always moving around, that he couldn't make friends, couldn't stay in touch with people or tell them what we did."

"You didn't mind that?"

He shrugged. "I could see why we couldn't. What we were doing … it was more important than just living some ordinary life, a job and bills and whatever."

And he'd felt that way until '05.


	17. Chapter 17 Frozen

**Chapter 17 Frozen**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean was silent for a while, and Alex watched the fire. Listening to him, describing those years, gave her a different view of the man who seemed so contradictory anyway; his voice had softened, warmth filling it as he'd looked back to times that had obviously been better.

Dean looked at her. "I was kidding myself, I think."

"How's that?"

He hesitated for a long time, looking at the fire, debating with himself, she thought, what to say, how much to say. He was private and she could see how uncomfortable he was, telling her these things. She couldn't understand why he wanted to.

* * *

Dean started talking, stumbling a little through the words at first, his gaze on the floor. He told her about his mother, and the deal she'd made and what had happened when it came due. Told her about his father's obsession with hunting that demon down when it took her and poisoned his brother. The telling was disjointed, punctuated with stops and starts, with hesitations and omissions, and Alex listened, watching his face, the emotions that chased over his features.

It was the first time he'd told anyone what he could remember, and he didn't know why he was doing it, only that having started, he couldn't stop. There was no one left to protect and his memories, his thoughts, were killing him gradually, the pain not diminishing with the years, but growing. He needed someone to trust, needed someone to know. He thought that he wanted someone to know him. Not just the hunter, not just the pieces he showed deliberately. Bobby knew parts but there were things he couldn't tell the old hunter. Cas knew most of it, but not the things that had started it all, the memories that had shaped him. Sam … he couldn't talk to his brother, even if the circumstances weren't as they were. Something lay between them and it corrupted them both, when they tried to let each other in.

She sat still on the chair, her attention on him, listening. She didn't move and she didn't ask questions, didn't interrupt. It made it easier. He told her about his father disappearing, and going to Stanford to get Sam, and Jess' death and the way he'd felt increasingly nervous as they'd followed the occasional clues his father left, looking for him, trying to deal with Sam's rage and pain, trying to keep his brother safe, feeling more and more pressure pushing on him when the visions had started. He hunched up as the memories flowed through him, memories of not knowing if he was doing the right thing, not knowing what he should be doing most of the time.

"I thought, when Dad showed up again, that I could hand it over to him," he said slowly, mouth twisting up derisively at the memory. "But everything had changed and he wasn't – he wouldn't stay. And it was more dangerous for us to be together than it was for him to go back on his own."

Sam had told him that he would be gone too. Would go back to a normal life as soon as they'd killed the demon. He'd looked into the future and had seen himself alone. No family. No friends left.

"What happened to your friends?" she asked him, watching the memories and emotions twist his features in the flickering firelight.

"They died," Dean said. "A demon killed Jim and Caleb, and my dad … he was dead within a couple of months."

"I'm sorry."

He looked over at her, straightening up and exhaling gustily. "Yeah. After that, all I had was Sam."

And Sam had been steadily drawn deeper into the demon's plans. He got up, walking to the kitchen counter, taking the whiskey down from the shelf and pouring some into two glasses.

Carrying them back to the fire, he handed her one and sat down, looking at the glass. He couldn't talk about what had come next. He was surprised to find that he wanted to … but it wouldn't come out. He'd told Sam some of it, but not all. Told Bobby even less. He didn't know what kept it locked inside, exactly. He just knew he couldn't. He thought it would break him in a way that he wouldn't be able to patch up.

"I found out that none of it mattered," he said slowly. "Nothing we could've done would've changed what happened. We were being manipulated and pushed around and we didn't know it."

He looked up at her. "They'd organised it all so that we'd have to play our parts, do what we were supposed to do. They knew exactly how to do it."

"They?"

"Heaven. The angels," he said tonelessly.

His father hadn't broken, in Hell. So they'd manipulated some more and he'd done what they'd expected him to, put himself exactly where they'd wanted him. Given them exactly what they'd wanted.

"Lucifer is free now because of me and Sam," he said softly, his gaze dropping to the glass. "His cage was locked and I broke the first seal, and Sam broke the last. So, I have to deal with him. I can't just stop and pretend it's not on me."

"Why are you buying into these prophecies, the signs and omens? You still control your destiny, don't you?" Alex looked at him helplessly. "Dean, you're not alone in this, you don't have to fight this alone."

"Because no matter what I've tried to do different, it all ends in the same place. You think I should drag these people along, get them killed so I don't have die on my own?" he asked, his voice hardening. "It's not their fight. They're the collateral damage."

"I think you should give people the choice," she said, brow creasing as she saw the despair in his face. "These people, they've earned the right to make their own decision about what they'll fight for, what they believe in. They believe in you, they're not going to let you go into this alone."

He looked away. "Then that's worse."

"No," she said. "I get that it might be impossible for you to ask, I understand that, but don't turn it away when it's offered."

The words weren't particularly ambiguous but for a moment, he sensed she was talking about something else. That sense cut through his thoughts of destiny and fate and he lifted his gaze, meeting her eyes questioningly.

In them, he saw her answer. And he couldn't believe it. It held him tightly in place, not moving, not breathing. And somewhere deep, where he'd buried and hidden his dreams, he felt a response that shocked him more. And the faintest of stirrings of something he'd thought, had believed, to have been broken beyond repair.

* * *

Looking into his eyes, Alex saw his question and she saw his eyes widen slightly as he saw her answer. Time slowed, and the moment stretched on and on as she realised that for all she'd thought she'd been getting to the know the man in front of her, she hadn't seen, hadn't recognised, hadn't realised the depths that he'd kept hidden away. She saw them now, in the still shock of his face.

The world changed in that moment. The impossible became possible. Everything she'd thought, everything she'd believed, vanished under the terrifying revelation that lay between them, that she'd unknowingly let him see. In the silence, her heart thudded hard against her ribs, boomed in her ears and she was filled with a sense of immense fragility, as if one breath, one word or movement, could destroy it all.

She dropped her gaze, turning away to see the eastern sky over the lake paling through the windows.

"I should get back to the house," she said, getting up and pulling her gloves on to hide the shaking of her hands as she walked to the door. She wound her scarf around her neck, keeping her eyes fixed to the cabin's floor. She was couldn't look back.

Dean watched her for a moment and got to his feet, standing by the table as she went out the door.

* * *

The arctic high had stalled over the state, and the temperatures remained well below freezing in the still air. The sharp cracks of the branches as they broke under the loads of ice, the crackle of the lake ice along the shore, the crunch and snap of the ice underfoot, filled the camps through the days and nights, and the thin, pale sunlight provided little in the way of warmth to melt it.

"There isn't a way realistically to do any runs until the ice melts," Dean said, looking out the window of Bobby's office.

"No," Alex agreed readily, her gaze on the ledger on the desk. "Bev said one of the trucks slid off the road trying to take sand up to the turnoff. We'll have enough for another six or seven weeks."

Rufus looked from one to the other, frowning slightly. For the last two weeks, every time he'd seen them, they'd been extremely polite, deferential to each other's opinions, one invariably agreeing with the other after a moment's conversation, and keeping a casual six foot distance between them without seeming to be doing it deliberately. He'd asked Alex what was going on and been told that he was imagining things. He didn't think he was.

"What about the rest of the camps?" Dean asked, his gaze shifting restlessly around the room.

"Renee said that they'll need some more of the root vegetables in a week or two. They've been taking teams out hunting, so they have plenty of meat. Patricia, Max and Jo say they have enough till March. We stocked the newer camps heavily, so they should be fine."

"Okay. Good," he said, exhaling audibly as he started for the door. Rufus felt his curiosity deepen. The hunter looked like he'd just escaped a trap, he thought.

"I've been wondering, if I start dreaming again, what you wanted to ask Sam specifically," Alex said diffidently. Rufus' brows shot up and Dean swung around to look at her, his gaze sliding off to the side after a second.

"No."

"I can't stay on Merrin's no-dream pill cocktail forever. Apparently dreaming is essential to mental well-being," she argued mildly, looking at Rufus.

"You were lucky to make it back with your spine still in you last time," Dean said distinctly, keeping his voice at an even level as he looked at the window. "It won't be forever."

"Sam may have the information that you need right now."

"And he may not be there. It might just be Lucifer waiting for you."

"We have to take some risks, or we'll fail before we begin."

"You don't have to take that risk," he said, and Rufus watched as his eyes returned to look at her reluctantly.

"But I want to," Alex said, looking up at him. Rufus saw him drop his gaze and turn away.

"No."

"Try and look this logically, there's nothing you can do about it if I don't take the pills tonight, and dream," Alex pointed out, her tone reasonable. "Wouldn't it be better if you told me what you needed to know so that at least if I'm taking the risk, it has a better payoff?"

Dean turned back to her slowly, his eyes narrowed. "I'm _asking_ you not to."

Rufus felt another jolt of surprise as he realised that had stopped Alex. She was looking down at the table again, her lower lip caught between her teeth.

"Uh … okay, Twilight Zone conversation aside," he said, glancing from her bowed head to Dean's stony face. "I think we have to sideline this issue until we can get to Kansas."

Dean turned to look at him. "Why?"

"Bobby said that there were a lot of heavy duty spells in the place, you found some pretty good protection stuff … maybe there'll be something there that'll make it safer for Alex to try again," Rufus said, looking from him to Alex and back.

"You gonna wait until we can get there?" Dean asked her tightly.

Alex looked at Rufus. "Yes."

"Alright."

Getting up, she picked up the book and walked to the door. "There wasn't anything else, was there?"

"No." Dean said, looking down at the desk. Rufus watched Alex leave the room and wheeled around to stare at the younger man.

"What the fuck is going on between you two?"

Dean glanced at him, his expression smoothing out blandly. "Nothing."

"Fuck nothin', Dean," Rufus said, looking from him to the door and back again. "The weird-ass conversations as if you've just met, the way you – you didn't worry about her contacting Sam before, why now?"

"She got ripped to shreds the last time, Rufus," Dean said, shrugging. "We don't need to know what Sam knows that bad."

"We do need to know it, and stop changing the damned subject," Rufus snapped.

"There's nothing going on," Dean said. "And if there's a way to make contacting Sam possible again, without risking – people's lives, then we'll go with it, but until then I don't need someone else's death on me."

"She volunteered!"

Dean looked flatly at him. "Doesn't change anything, does it? If she tried and came back dead? Or not at all? Who would that be on?"

"Fine." Rufus exhaled noisily. "What about the rest of it?"

Dean smiled at him humourlessly. "What'd Bobby say about the satellite uplink?"

* * *

The snowmobile's raucous howl bounced off the icy surfaces and the building walls as it came down through the snow beside the ice-over driveway and Dean turned to see Father Michael send a wide spray of snow and ice crystals over the road as he stopped in a half-skid beside the church. Behind the priest Ben got off, pulling his scarf down and pushing the over-sized adult goggles up as the engine died.

Standing on the porch, Dean watched them walk across to the steps, trying to keep his expression neutral. He could see Ben was stiff and hunched as he climbed the steps, the boy's tension increasing his own.

"Padre," he said as Father Michael reached him.

The priest smiled at him and looked down at Ben. "Good morning, Dean. Ben asked me to bring him over. He'd like to talk to you, if you have some time?"

Dean looked from the man to the boy and nodded reluctantly. "Sure. You want to get warmed up inside?"

"Excellent idea," Father Michael agreed immediately. "Alex got any of the cider left?"

"Still a couple of barrels. Should be some over the fire," Dean told him absently, watching Ben as Father Michael glanced down at the boy and turned away, stamping his boots on the mat in front of the door and going in.

"Come on, Bobby's office is warmer than here," Dean said. "It's quiet."

Ben nodded and followed him inside, his hands tucked into his coat pockets, watching the heels of Dean's boots as they walked through the hall and down to the office.

Dean closed the door behind them and stood next to it, waiting.

In the warmth of the office, Ben stopped beside the desk, turning around to face him. He looked up, his face still flushed from the ride over from Tawas in the frigid cold, his expression nervous.

"I came – I wanted to say I'm sorry," he said in a low voice. "I said things – I'm sorry for what I said to you, Dean."

Dean looked down at him, nodding slowly. "That's okay."

Ben shook his head. "No, it wasn't okay. I don't think I remembered anything right, from what happened. I – I – I was mad at you, but I was mad at her too. I didn't know that."

"You want to sit down?"

Ben looked around at the chair behind him and backed to it, perching on the edge as Dean took another chair and pulled it closer.

"I talked to Father Michael, a lot, about it," Ben continued, his gaze fixed on the floor in between them. "And Pastor Gideon too. And Alex and Renee and Duncan."

Dean wasn't sure what to say to that. He waited, uncomfortably aware that his palms were sweating, wiping them discreetly on the sides of his jeans.

"I thought … Mom said …" Ben stumbled over the words, trying to figure out what he needed to say. "I thought you would – might – be my dad, when the baby came, you know?" He flicked an upward glance at Dean. "I thought it would be different. I thought Mom would be happy again."

Dean looked away. He didn't know what would have happened, if things had gone on without the attack on the camp. He'd known Ben's hopes, and Lisa's. Had known that he couldn't give them what they wanted. He'd been prepared to try. But he knew now that it never would have come close to what it was supposed to be like.

"It wasn't your fault, I can see that," Ben said softly. "She – she said those things to make it hurt worse, to make us remember it worse."

Inside, where he'd buried it all, Dean felt those memories, that pain, loosen a little. It wasn't going to go away or ever feel alright, he thought remotely. But the edges would slowly dull, until they didn't cut anymore. Ben's pain and rage and grief had hurt the most.

Ben looked up at him sadly. "I'm sorry for what I said to you. I'm sorry I made it worse too."

"I never wanted to hurt her, Ben, or you," Dean said, forcing the words out through the tightness of his throat.

"I know," Ben said. "Renee said that the virus made her different, made her do things that she wouldn't've done, but sometimes she was mad at you, and maybe it took that mad and just used it."

Dean blinked at the thought, at the way the boy had come up with it. "Maybe, Ben. But I don't think she would have tried to hurt you like that."

The boy shook his head. "Are you mad at me?"

"No," Dean frowned. "No, I'm not. Why would you think that?"

"I was mad at you. I lied, tried to make you feel bad about – you know," Ben said, his face reddening as he admitted it. "I wanted … I did what Mom did, in a way."

Shaking his head, Dean got up and walked over to him, crouching down in front of him. "Ben, listen to me, okay? How we react, when something really bad happens, that's not … it's understandable. I'm not mad at you. I know what you were feeling."

Ben nodded, looking at him. "I'm sorry."

Dean let out his breath in a long, soft exhale. "I'm sorry too."

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Bobby looked at the screen as the words typed themselves across it.

"_Need to find way for Alex to dream safely. On our way to you as soon as ice melts."_

He rubbed his hand over his jaw thoughtfully. "Jerome, we need to get everything we can on dreams and dreaming," he called out.

Ellen walked down the stairs from the library, and stopped behind him, reading the message over his shoulder.

"We need to find out why she has a conduit to the devil's house too," she said thoughtfully. Bobby nodded. There had to be a connection. They'd looked through some of the library for answers when Dean had contacted over the radio but the library was vast. They might have better luck narrowing down the search if they could question her about what happened, how it happened.

With the uplink established to each of the remaining order chapters and to Chitaqua, Tawas and Sable, they had a more or less reliable communication link. And the ability to search not just the library here, but the others as well.

Bobby leaned forward and typed in the response to Dean, then requests to each of the other chapters to search their libraries for any information they contained on dreams and dreaming and dreamers.

"It might take a while," he said to Ellen, leaning back when the last one had gone through.

"Dean said we have five months," Ellen said tersely. "So we'll go as fast as we can."

Jerome had been teaching the two girls, Taylor and Frances, the beginnings of the legacy rituals. Both girls seemed to be fascinated by the histories they were going through. The adult researchers had become even more immersed, Ellen thought as she pushed Bobby's chair back up the ramp to the library. Aaron and Ted were working their way through the catalogues of artefacts held here, and comparing it with what was held in the vaults of the other chapters. So far they'd barely scratched the surface of the collections, but all of them sensed the possibilities. There was such a lot of mythology centred around objects and weapons and charms that it seemed impossible that they wouldn't find something to help them defeat Lucifer once and for all time.

Jerome looked around as they came up to the table. "There are fifty-eight hundred entries in the cards for dream or dream-related myth or legend in the main library. That's just here. There're another four-hundred and eighty references in the apothecary and artefact records," he said sourly.

"We'll put everyone on it," Bobby said tiredly, wincing as he leaned forward. Ellen frowned at him.

"And we'll be able to narrow it down when Alex gets here, find out the connection she has," Ellen added. "Come on, Singer, you need a hot bath and a rub-down."

"Stop fussing, woman," Bobby grated, his face pale with the pain that was crawling up his body.

"When you get back to a normal colour and stop sweating, I'll stop fussing," Ellen said, turning the wheelchair and pushing it toward the elevator. She glanced back over her shoulder at Jerome.

"See you in the morning."

He nodded, bending over the pile of books and his notebook again.

The elevator took them to the first floor, and Ellen pushed the chair straight to the bathroom. "Doesn't do any good to keep pushing past the pain, Bobby, you know that."

"We ain't got that much time, Ellen."

"We've got enough that you don't need to undo everything we've done to get you mobile again," she said, pushing him into the tiled room and going to the big tub to turn on the taps. "You need to accept what you can do and what you can't."

Bobby scowled at the floor, the rush of water into the enamelled tub too loud to hear his muttered comment.

Ellen smiled and pushed the chair alongside the tub. He could support himself, carefully, now. Enough to move from the chair to the bath, or a bed, without having to be lifted.

Kneeling in front of him, she unlaced and pulled off his boots and socks, and waited for him to take off his cap, the checked button-through shirt and the long-sleeved t-shirt under that. The boundaries of modesty had been dealt with a while ago, and Bobby hooked an arm around Ellen's shoulders to support him as she unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned the thin denim jeans, letting them fall to the floor. He lifted himself out of the puddled cloth at his feet with a hand on the edge of the tub and the arm around her, and eased himself over the rim into the deepening hot water.

"Damned bossy woman," he murmured, eyes closing blissfully as the hot water surrounded the aching limbs and seeped into the sore muscles on either side of his spine. Ellen snorted, turning the taps off as the water level covered his chest.

Bobby lay back, listening absently to the small noises that echoed in the bathroom without paying much attention to them. His eyes flew open as he felt the water shift up, displaced as Ellen eased herself down in front of him, her wet skin sliding against his.

"Ellen! What the –"

"Just relax, Singer," she said, turning over in the steaming water and looking at him. "Don't pretend you didn't see this comin', down the line."

He couldn't answer that. It'd been one of the many things he'd been trying his best not to think of, not to even consider.

His eyes fluttered shut as her lips found his and the sensations the touch brought shunted the remaining pain aside completely.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Rufus paced across the office, scowling furiously. "It's quiet, goddammit."

"For now," Dean agreed stonily. "But when has that ever lasted long? I need you here."

The older hunter stopped and looked at him balefully. "Alright, alright, I guess. But there's some things you'd better know before you go."

Dean lifted a brow as Rufus walked to the shelves on the other side of the office, pulling out a slim manila folder from between two books. He tossed the folder onto the desk in front of Dean and dropped into the chair.

Pulling the folder toward him, Dean opened it and skimmed over the first news article on the top, looking up at Rufus accusingly.

"I knew you knew more about it than you were saying!"

Rufus shrugged. "I checked Grand Rapids after the second dream, didn't figure it was anybody's business until it had to be."

"Dammit, Rufus," Dean said, staring at him for a moment then dropping his gaze back to the file and starting to read.

The office was silent as he worked through the articles. Rufus stared broodingly at the fireplace. He'd been through the reports a dozen times. Nothing had leapt out at him. But it was background, and like or not, Alex had become a job, something to figure out. He didn't like it, especially.

Dean closed the folder when he'd read through the last report, his face shuttered. A lot of details missed out on, he thought tiredly, remembering her brief summary.

Like being pregnant when she'd left. Like he'd found her after six months. Like the fine white scars that criss-crossed her abdomen had been from her husband knifing her repeatedly, killing the child she was carrying and leaving her for dead. Like the two years she'd spent in the hospital after the police had found her when a neighbour had called them on hearing the gunshots. Like the charges that had been laid against her when she'd gotten out, being arrested, jailed and facing a four month court case complete with media circus after that.

Rubbing a hand over his face, he flinched inwardly as the memory of his words in the garage came back to him. Fuck, she'd had a good reason to run and hide and to keep running.

"Did you see the police reports? The hospital reports?" he asked Rufus.

Rufus shook his head. "No, just the media stuff. Why?"

He shrugged. "I don't know."

There wasn't really anything in the account to explain the connection to Atlanta, to Sam. Except possibly how close to death she'd actually been. Maybe. The reports were lurid, but probably not all that accurate.

He turned in the chair and stared out the window. Outside, the sunshine was bright and the sound of dripping water was everywhere. He could hear the distant shrieks of the camp's kids, somewhere around the other side of the house. The ice had been thawing for a couple of days now.

* * *

_**Indiana**_

"Favourite war movie," Dean said, his eyes on the road, the sun glistening from the wet surface and occasionally spearing into his eyes.

"Guns of Navarone," Alex said, curled into the corner between the door and the back of the seat.

He flicked a sideways glance at her, one brow rising. "Thought you'd pick Casablanca."

She shook her head. "I'm not much of a romantic," she said. "I could never get behind her decision to pick Victor over Rick."

One corner of his mouth lifted up slightly. "Favourite western?"

"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," she answered promptly.

He nodded. "Even against the recent ones?"

"Oh yeah," she said, pushing the curls back from her face. "I liked Appaloosa, and I love Silverado, but Butch and Sundance? Definite favourite."

"Uh … favourite action?"

"Raiders."

"More adventure than action," he corrected her. "Pick again."

"Okay …" She thought of the films that fell into the correct genre. "Probably too many to make a definitive call, but I'll say Die Hard."

Again his brow rose. "Bruce Willis?"

"Alan Rickman."

It surprised a laugh out of him.

"My turn," she said, drawing up her legs and wrapping her arms around them. "Favourite drama."

He smiled. "Cuckoo's Nest, or maybe The Godfather."

"Favourite romantic comedy?" she asked, watching his profile.

"Uh … High Fidelity," he answered after a few moments' consideration.

"Hmmm … sliding in on the edge there."

He shrugged. "Not really my preferred genre."

"Too mushy?"

"Definitely."

He'd thought that the trip would be made in tense silence, when they'd left Chitaqua before dawn. Too many things that neither of them were talking about or looking at. But she'd come up with innocuous, impersonal questions and the miles had flown by under the black car's wheels, the conversation ranging from topic to topic lightly and easily, without any tension at all. He'd been constantly surprised by her views on even trivial things, like the movies, he hadn't expected their tastes to be similar.

He'd been mostly surprised she wasn't a screwed-up basket case, he thought, a faint acid edge of bitterness lining his memory of the file he'd read. He shouldn't have been. He'd known her long enough to know that she wasn't the type to lie down and die. Even the first meeting, when she'd told him to drink the water first, had told him that she wasn't someone who was knocked down easily.

She wasn't necessarily tough, he thought, glancing at her. But she had a resilient strength, and she was honest with herself. Knew her limitations, knew what she could handle and what she couldn't and didn't try to lie to herself about them. And she thought clearly. Found solutions to problems instead of worrying what would happen next. He liked that. It was a relief in a world where problems stared at them all day long and the solutions weren't that obvious. The camps had worked out well. The gardens and the livestock … the medical supplies she'd thought of … he snorted softly. Would anyone else have thought of the goddamned tetracycline for plague, for Christ's sake? They hadn't lost anyone to the diseases the croats had been infected with.

His thoughts drifted incrementally around the memory he wasn't looking at. He wasn't sure now that he'd even seen what he'd thought he'd seen, in that endless moment of stillness, with the dawn light behind her through the windows and the firelight flickering over her face. Pushing the memory impatiently aside, he thought he was probably kidding himself. Remembering it wrong. Thinking that it had been there because he'd wanted it to be there, because he'd felt as if he could trust someone again.

* * *

_**Atlanta, Georgia**_

Lucifer walked the length of the hall restlessly, staring out through the windows at the soft rain falling over the gardens outside, more cloud than rain, filling the open ground and wreathing under the trees.

"Where are they all, Sammy?" the fallen angel whispered into the silence. "What is your brother doing?"

Locked in matrix of his brain, Sam was silent. The angel didn't know. Didn't know what was going on, but he could feel the threads coming unravelled, the lines being rewoven, the paths changing little by little.

"How did she get away?!" The sudden shriek filled the hall, echoing off the hard surfaces.

Sam remained silent. Remote from the angel's rage, a rage that was being driven all the time by fear. He knew, now, why she'd slipped across the veil that separated the planes the first time. The angel still didn't. He knew that it had been inadvertent that first time. And the second. But she'd come deliberately the third time, and he knew how she'd done it, although he had the sense that she didn't. Didn't know she'd chosen to come. Didn't know how.

The angel could see his memories, those records laid down through his life. He could feel the thoughts that permeated them, his feelings. How he'd felt about all of it. Lucifer had used the thought and memory and emotion to torture him, when he'd been bored. He wasn't bored now. But Sam kept his revelations to himself, locked in the most _Sam_ part of himself, the part he thought was his soul.

She'd appeared suddenly in the hall, and Sam hadn't been able to warn her. Lucifer had known somehow that she would come. The demons had been waiting, hanging invisible and silent in the shadowed vaults of the hall's ceiling. The man, the one that knew her, that she knew, had been drawn from the deep earth, Death raising him on the devil's command. Whoever he was, whatever he'd been to her, he'd seen terror take her over at the sight of him and she'd run, blindly, from door to door, forgetting how to get out, forgetting what she'd done to get here, to get back.

He'd felt his body change. For him, that had been the most terrifying thing. Feeling the wings erupt from his shoulder blades. Watching his hands lengthen and long, black claws split out through his fingertips. Feeling his face elongate and broaden, his teeth shift inside of his mouth, his feet twist and deform. Lucifer had heard him, screaming inside, and had laughed.

Watching through the devil's eyes – his eyes – Sam had felt his hope disappear. The demons had harried her around the hall, until she'd stopped, trapped in a corner, arms raised defensively against the slicing slashes of their claws. The man had swung at her, and she'd been frozen, the heavy fist hitting the side of her head and knocking her down, the wide swing of his arm as he'd raised a long, curving knife above her. He'd thought that she would die here, and that would be the end of any chance he could've had to tell Dean what he needed to know, what he had to know.

But she'd twisted away, the blade slicing through the top she wore. Had twisted away and sprung to her feet and screamed at the man, her face distorted by a savage, primal rage, her fists striking with accuracy and speed, driving him back and a gun, an old-fashioned .38 revolver appearing suddenly in her hand, the retorts loud in the hall as she emptied all six shots into the man's face and body.

Had it not been a servant of Lucifer, perhaps she could've escaped then. Sam didn't know.

The man had gotten to his feet and she'd stared at him blankly, shock wiping all her empowering rage away. And Lucifer had laughed again, the sound booming from the walls and shaking the demons from the ceiling and she'd spun around and run again, panicking, blind, hands outstretched in front of her. The angel had crossed the hall behind her in two strides, wings stretching out to either side and filling the space with the scent of feathers, of brimstone and acid, and he'd reached out for her spine.

Sam had felt the long nails rip into her flesh, saw her arch back mid-stride with the pain and then she'd vanished. And he'd seen her do it. And he was sure that the angel hadn't.

So now he had to wait. Wait for Lucifer's attention to move to something else. The angel was a like a child, in many ways. Petulant and spoiled and easily distracted. He would give up waiting for her, here in the hall, would turn his thoughts elsewhere and Sam would try and call her, with the images he knew would bring her, would try and keep it secret from the angel, for at least long enough to tell her. About the oil. And the Spear. And the way out for all of them.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

"Balthazar!"

Bobby and Ellen exchanged a glance as the angel leapt to his feet at the end of the table.

"Shazam?" Chuck offered tentatively.

Castiel frowned at him and turned back to the table. "We can summon him."

"Summon who?" Bobby asked cautiously.

"Balthazar, he's an angel," Cas said, moving around the tables to the door. "A … friend."

Ellen watched him leave the room and shrugged. "Okay."

"Should someone go with him?" Chuck looked at them. "I mean, if he's serious about summoning an angel, it shouldn't be in here, right?"

"Knock yourself out, Chuck." Bobby shrugged, gesturing to the door. "How you're gunna stop him … that should be interestin'."

Chuck ignored that and followed the angel down the hall to the stairs and listened. There were noises coming from downstairs.

In the apothecary, Chuck found Cas moving from shelf to shelf, gathering ingredients with Oliver and Frances, the angel's face hard and cold.

"Cas, you're not going to summon a strange angel inside our stronghold, are you?" he asked diffidently.

"He will be contained within the circle," Cas said distractedly, turning around and staring at the shelves on the other side of the room. "I need more myrrh."

"There's some in the storerooms," Taylor said helpfully. "I'll get it."

Chuck watched her race out of the room and heard her footsteps go down the hall.

"But won't it give away our position, here? When Dean comes, this angel can tell Michael exactly where to find him."

"He won't," Cas said. "Candles," he said to Oliver. The young man nodded and opened the deep drawers of the chest on the other side of the room.

"Any kind?"

"Beeswax for preference," Cas said, frowning.

Jerome rolled his chair into the room and looked at the angel. "You're going to summon an angel?"

"Balthazar is a friend," Cas said, looking at him. "If we can reach him, he can get the holy oil and bring it here."

Chuck looked from the angel to Jerome. "Am I the only one who thinks this is a bad idea?"

* * *

_**Missouri**_

"So, you grew up on a farm?" Dean asked Alex. The headlights had enclosed the world to the car and the stretch of road he could see. The medallion lay against his skin, warm now. He'd slipped it on when they'd crossed into the state, seeing a furtive movement in the rubble of a town they'd driven through. He wondered how long before its effects became pronounced and he'd just stop talking.

"Not really a farm," she said. "We had a few acres, by a lake. It was just my Dad and me, and he trapped in the winter, we grew as much as we could in the spring and summer."

He let out a breath. "What happened to your mom?"

"She died when I was born."

"Sorry."

"I didn't know her," Alex said prosaically. "I wish I had, my dad was devoted to her, he used to tell me about her, said she was beautiful and kind and smart. He tried his best to make up for her not being there. He got sick when I was sixteen, and he went fast." She sighed and looked out the dark window. "Now, I'm glad he wasn't around for what happened after, it would have hurt him."

He chewed on his lip, wondering if he should tell her that he knew. It didn't feel right to not say anything. But he didn't know how she'd react. Fifty-fifty, he thought. Not great odds.

"Alex … Rufus went up to Grand Rapids," he said slowly. He could feel her gaze on him, sharpening as he hesitated. "He got the newspapers reports on what happened … to you."

He glanced across at her. She hadn't moved, was still sitting curled into the corner, looking out into the darkness, her cheek against the glass. He couldn't see her face.

"I'm sorry, but we had to know," he said. "If there was any connection we could find between you and Lucifer, or Sam, to figure out why you were dreaming of them."

She remained silent. His hands curled around the wheel in frustration. _Fuck_. He should've known it was a better idea to lie to her a bit longer, at least. He couldn't've, not a straight lie, but he could've kept it to himself, told her – _when?_ – sometime. Sometime later.

"Alex, it wasn't your fault, you didn't do anything wrong," he tried again, glancing across to her.

She didn't move, didn't even blink from what he could see of her reflection in the black-backed glass.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Castiel drew out the circle and placed the candles around it. The level between the generator room and the lowest of the library floors was shielded, Jerome had told him, and was where the order did their conjurations when required. Balthazar could be called to the room but wouldn't be able to cross out of the circle or the room itself.

He turned to the long table and began to mix the powders and herbs in a wide-mouthed silver bowl. The summoning spell was simple, but powerful, both compulsion and guide to the celestial creatures that humanity called angels. He had no key except the angel's sigil, his name in the Enochian script. It was usually enough to contact and compel.

He turned to watch Jerome move slowly around the circle, lighting the candles and added the final cup of dried and powdered blood to the bowl, carrying it to the centre of the circle.

Chuck and Jerome, Oliver and Frances stood well back from the lines, watching silently. Cas lit the match and dropped it into the bowl, stepping back as the contents ignited in a burst of white light, the flash disappearing and the charred remains smouldering, sending a thin, twisting column of saffron smoke into the air and up to the ceiling.

The angel who stood in the centre of the circle was not in a vessel. Not precisely. The construct was a facsimile of his original vessel, a man who'd lived several hundred years ago and had been released to death after centuries of service. Balthazar claimed to feel sentimental about the man and had used the construct ever since.

"Castiel."

"Balthazar," Cas said, inclining his head slightly. "It's good to see you."

"I'd like to say the same, but this is … well, it's not exactly a cordial invitation, is it?"

"I'm sorry," Cas said, shrugging. "I'm cut off and this was the only way I could reach you."

Balthazar looked around. The construct he wore was tall and thin, blond hair silvering at the front and sides slightly, blue eyes that missed nothing, always a little secretive, a little amused. He gestured around the room.

"Let me guess, Litteris Hominae?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't compel me here for a chat," Balthazar said slowly, turning back to him. "Or there'd've been some tea, and scones, and cucumber sandwiches, and a slightly more civilised atmosphere."

"We need holy oil."

Balthazar looked at him thoughtfully. "You're more than cut off, aren't you, Cas?"

The angel looked away. "I can't do anything."

"Oh, you've been doing plenty," Balthazar contradicted him. "You and your human friends have put Heaven and Hell into a frenzy of action."

"What do you mean?"

"Michael is about to break the seventh seal, Cas," Balthazar told him. "And Lucifer is scouring the planet for any sign of the man who keeps throwing wrenches in his plans."

"Balthazar, we need the oil," Cas said. "And we need it right now."

"And what do I get out of this little transaction, Cas?" The angel stared at him. "Michael finds out I'm participating in your rebellion-for-one and I'll be disintegrated."

"You get a chance to help us save the world," Jerome said, wheeling his chair closer to the circle. "A chance to help us undo what Heaven has wrought."

"Destiny determined this, mortal," Balthazar said coolly, turning to look at him.

"No," Jerome said. "No, Heaven determined that the bloodlines of Araquiel and Azazel would be joined and that the union would produce the only two men who could possibly free Lucifer." He stared coldly at Balthazar. "Whether you know it or not, someone in Heaven went to a lot of trouble to make sure this all came to pass."

"Cas?"

"It's true," Castiel said, looking at the floor. "I didn't believe it, but the evidence is here. I don't know if Michael was a part of it or not, but someone meddled seriously enough to have changed the lines, and now they're still changing."

"Raphael has been preparing the Host."

Cas nodded. "How long do we have before the seal is broken?"

"Not long."

"We need the mark of God," he said tersely, turning to Jerome. "It is a paste, to mark those that angel of the abyss cannot take, to keep the faithful safe."

"I know it," Jerome said, glancing at the others. "We have the ingredients here."

"Every camp must be marked."

Jerome nodded, gesturing to Chuck, Oliver and Frances. "We need to tell the others, the chapters and the camps and anyone else we can reach."

Cas turned back to Balthazar. "Abaddon was destroyed, has a replacement been chosen?"

"There is talk that Lucifer has chosen Baal for the job," Balthazar said.

"We need the oil, Balthazar. Please."

"Jerusalem was hit hard by the virus, by Famine and Pestilence and Death, Cas," the angel said, looking down at the circle in which he was trapped. "No guarantees."

"No, but will you try?"

"Yes." Balthazar looked at his friend. "You'll have to release a part of me."

Castiel nodded and covered the bowl, trapping the spiralling smoke from the smouldering ingredients inside. He spoke in a low voice, the harsh Enochian little more than a murmur and the angel in the circle became translucent, thinning out to a pale shadow.

* * *

Bobby looked around as Castiel walked into the library. "The seventh seal, Cas, how long before the angels begin to use the horns?"

"The first angel sounds the first trumpet twenty-four hours after the seal is broken," Cas said, glancing down to the situation room where Jerome, Aaron, Ted and Oliver were typing at the computers.

"_And the first trumpet sounded, and hail and fire, mingled with blood, were cast upon on the earth and a third of the vegetation was burned up_," Ellen read from the book in front of her.

"Each twenty-four hours after that, another angel will blow a trumpet." Castiel nodded, looking at her. "Until the sixth angel. The Fallen One will have thirty days to scour the earth."

"Volcanic eruption, and the sea becomes as blood; a meteor falls and poisons the waters; the eclipse, last for three days … and then the angel of the abyss …"

"Balthazar has said that Baal will be the chosen. He will bring the locusts and they will torment the living like scorpions. Death will not find them." Castiel told them. "Every human who is not protected by the Mark."

"Great," Bobby snarled, looking down at the table. "We have to get moving on getting the rest of the people out of Lucifer's cities."

"Austin and Vegas were the other two," Ellen said, frowning as she walked down the steps to the computers and stopped behind Jerome. "Tell Rufus, Boze and Emmett that we're going to have move now."

* * *

Castiel sat in the dimly lit room, waiting. In the circle the essence of Balthazar stood unmoving, head tipped back and eyes vacant. It shouldn't have taken this long, he thought uneasily.

He looked down at the covered bowl in the circle and got to his feet slowly, walking to it. After a moment's hesitation, he bent and lifted the lid, the smoke curling upwards again.

Balthazar appeared in the circle, merging instantly with the shadow of himself.

"Your timing is, as usual, impeccable," the angel gasped out. Cas stared at him. He was dressed in a long, white robe, torn and bloody and covered in dirt, clutching an earthenware urn tightly in his arms, a long cut running from the corner of one eye down to his jaw.

"What happened?"

"You wouldn't believe what's taken up residence in the Temple," Balthazar said tightly, handing the angel the urn and looking down at himself. "I didn't believe it until the bloody thing took a swipe at me."

"What was it?" Cas took the urn to the table, setting it down carefully. From the weight, it was full.

"A basilisk!"

"Set there deliberately to guard it?"

"I don't think so," Balthazar said distractedly, brushing at the robe ineffectually. "I think it just found it empty and moved in."

"Thank you," Cas said, gesturing to the oil.

His friend looked up, the humour gone from his eyes. "Are you sure about Heaven's involvement in this, Cas?"

"Completely."

"Then you better watch your back," Balthazar warned him. "Michael is livid that he's having to use a substitute vessel, and Raph is egging him on, I think, making it all worse."

"Can you think of a way to let me know when the first trumpet is about to sound?"

The angel nodded. "In the east, there'll be a sustained glow, in the morning, your morning, on the day of the first trumpet. Look for it."

"Be careful," Castiel told him.

"Yes, you too."

Cas broke the edge of the circle and Balthazar disappeared. In the bowl the smoke vanished as well. He looked down at the candles and moved his hand in a sweeping gesture. The candle flames flickered but remained. Sighing, he got to his knees and began to blow them out.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Rufus stared disbelievingly at the screen in front of him, his hand writing down the list anyway. Blood, powdered quartz crystal, hawthorn and ash, burned, salt. They had everything. All the camps did.

And getting to Austin and Vegas. Just like that, with a week at most to get the people out and into some kind of shelter that could be protected. Just like that. Goddamned towns were at least a three-day drive in opposite directions.

He put the pen down and rubbed a hand over his face. Well, the hits just kept on comin', he thought sourly. He'd need to get up to Tawas, get Emmett and Vincent over there as well.

They would need four teams for the two cities. Which would take every experienced hunter out of the camps, all at the same time. So before they tried it, they'd need to make up the goop first, and make sure that whoever was left in command here, knew what it was, how to make more if need be, the importance of making sure every single building was marked.

How the hell would they get those people out? And get them back? And protect along the way?

Writing down the key questions, he sighed to himself and swivelled the chair around, getting up and going out of the office to find Kim and Merrin. They'd be running the show here while he was gone.

* * *

It took two days to get everyone ready. Emmett and Max were leading the Vegas job. They were taking Franklin, Risa and Mark with them.

"No buses, no trains, just a couple of roads through the desert, we'll be sitting ducks for anyone coming after us," Emmett said cheerfully, loading the truck with the weapons they were taking.

"Not much choice," Rufus agreed. He and Boze were taking Austin, along with Rona, Martin and Sandra. Jo, Ty, Vincent and Maurice would be staying to run the camps, to make sure the people and livestock they had were protected. "Once that first horn blows, we'll have five days before the shit hits the fan, relatively speaking, and we'll have to go as fast as we can then find whatever shelter we can."

The paste of the Mark had been put into dozens of milk cans, stacked inside the trucks with the weapons. He hoped there'd be enough.

Franklin had made up as many demon bombs as their meagre store of ingredients had allowed. There weren't enough to be reassuring. The Stingers and missiles were loaded, the usual salt and consecrated iron bearing rounds were packed. They had bags of rock salt, stronger paint mixes with suspended iron filings for traps … he looked over the truck's contents and shook his head.

He'd drawn out the sigil they needed to use. It was Gabriel's. Everyone had memorised the twisting lines, the odd circle joins, the pattern that would protect them from Baal's notice. At least they had the lore on this one, he thought humourlessly.

Reading through the passages of Revelations had sent a chill down his spine as he'd realised exactly what was coming. Even Death's work, the storms and earthquakes, had been more random than this. The angel of the abyss had the power to take out everyone not protected by the Mark and that would run into millions.

_Just get as many safe as you can_, he told himself firmly, shunting the thoughts aside. _Do your job and don't think about the rest._

He walked down the line of trucks, and stopped at the last, opening the door to the cab and swinging himself up and inside.

Throughout the camps, people were frantically picking whatever could be picked and kept, livestock was being brought in, small parties of hunters were going out to get whatever game they could find to keep the supplies lasting longer. The Mark had been painted on every building in the five camps, over the farmhouses and barns that would keep the animals sheltered. There wasn't anything else they could do.

Boze's truck rumbled to life at the head of the column and Rufus twisted the key, the diesel engine in front of him starting up and belching a puff of black smoke into the air. He put the truck in gear as the ones ahead moved slowly up the drive, aware that the people of the camp had stopped what they were doing and were watching them go, aware that Dominique was somewhere inside, standing by a window, watching him leave.

_I'll be back, baby_, he told her silently. _Bet your sweet ass, I will._

* * *

_**Kansas**_

Dean looked down at Alex. She was sleeping on the sofa in the living room, curled up. They were no more than three hours from Lebanon, and they'd get there in the morning. He'd pulled into the small abandoned house just after midnight, the medallion's power already drawing away his thoughts and feelings.

Picking up the blanket that he'd brought from the car, he spread it over her. It was better this way, he thought remotely. Better that she hated him and wouldn't talk or look at him. Better than feeling anything else for him. He couldn't hurt her if she hated him. And he didn't have to face the prospect of her leaving or dying, the inevitable ending for anyone who trusted him, whom he cared about.

He had a vague memory of wanting to feel. Wanting to trust. But it was a bad idea, he thought. Better to trust no one but himself. Better not to care about anything at all so that he could get the job done with no distractions. Better not to want anything, period.

He turned away and walked to the hall, going to check the protection he'd laid down around the house. Salt lines. Devil's traps. Trip wires. All in place. All undisturbed. Wearing the medallion should keep them out of view anyway, but he'd been trained too well to rely on one defence, on a single solution.

Going back to the living room, he sat by the windows that looked out over the street. He didn't feel tired. He stared out through the glass and didn't notice that he was becoming numb, or cold. Or that he'd stopped thinking of anything.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

The car stopped near the end of the road, trees blocking further progress, the forest crowding close. Alex watched Dean get out and move down the road a little further, mist rising suddenly from the ground and between the tree trunks, swirling in a grey shroud around him.

Something had changed in him, she knew. When she'd woken, she'd been alone in the room and she'd sat up, folding the blanket up. She'd heard the sound of the car's engine from outside and for a moment, she'd wondered if he was just leaving her there. She'd realised that the engine was idling and had gone out to find him sitting in the car, staring straight ahead. When she'd gotten in and closed the door, he reversed back down the narrow driveway and turned onto the street, heading west without a word.

He turned and gestured to her abruptly and she got out of the car, following him through the dense grey mist, feeling her heart speed up as it clung to her, her nerves prickling in unconscious alarm, making her hurry to catch up to him. He was standing in front of a huge oak when the mists suddenly disappeared, a hillside appeared beside her and she saw that there was a door in front of him, opening slowly.

A crack of thunder made her jump and she looked up as Dean did. Above them the sky roiled with cloud, heavy and dark and flickering with lightning. Another deafening crack sounded very close and she flinched involuntarily as something hit her shoulder, looking down at the fist-sized chunk of ice bouncing on the road. And then it was falling all around them, the woods blazing across the road where the lightning bolt had struck and a keening buzz in the air that made her teeth ache.

"Inside! Now!" Dean strode to her, grabbing her arm and dragging her fast along the road and down the steps to the doorway. His arm lifted over her, deflecting the ice that was pelting them as he thrust her through the door and lurched after her. Chuck closed the door behind them, the massive locks settling into place with deep, resonant thuds and the fusillade of hail was shut out completely.

Castiel looked up at them as they stood on the gallery. "The seventh seal is broken. The first trumpet has sounded."

Dean glanced down at him, pushing Alex ahead of him to the stairs. "I take it that's not good news."

"No," the angel said tensely. "We have five days before the angel of the abyss is given the key and releases the locusts."

Dean lifted a brow. "Releases the locusts?"

"Figure of speech, maybe," Bobby said as they came down the stairs and crossed the situation room. "Heaven gives one of the Fallen free rein to kill anyone on earth not protected by the mark of God."

"Sounds like fun," Dean said disinterestedly. "What've you found on dreams?"

"Nothing so far," Ellen said, a small crease between her brows. "There's no lore on going to sleep and strolling somewhere else with your body. Plenty of it relating to leaving your body behind."

Alex stopped beside the table and looked at the piles of books there.

"Guess we better start reading then," Dean said. He sat down at the table and pulled a pile toward him, pulling the top one off and opening it.

"Dean, we've got the holy oil," Cas said, moving to the end of the table. "But the seventh seal, that's going to speed everything else up."

"Later, Cas," Dean said sharply. "One impossible problem at a time."

Bobby exchanged a glance with the angel, brows lifting as he looked back at Dean. "We had to get the camps moving on getting Austin and Vegas slaves out."

"And are they? Moving on it?"

"Yeah, Emmett and Max are taking Vegas, Rufus and Boze'll take Austin," Bobby said. "They left this morning."

"Good." Dean looked back at the book.

* * *

"What's going on with Dean?" Bobby asked Alex quietly fourteen hours later.

"I don't know," she said tiredly, pushing another dead end book away from her. "We had a falling out in the car, and he's been distant ever since."

"When was that?" Ellen looked at her.

"Uh … day before last."

"Has he slept?"

"Not that I've seen."

Ellen turned to the stacks and walked between them, looking for the hunter. She found him searching the end of a shelf, eyes narrowed as he read through the titles.

"Dean, how long since you got some shut-eye?" she asked him.

"I'm fine, Ellen," he said automatically, snagging a book and pulling it out to look at the contents page.

"You look like hell."

"Thanks."

"I'm serious," she pressed, walking around in front of him as he moved down the shelf. "We could all use some."

"Ellen, we'll get some sleep when we've found out what Sam's been trying to tell us."

"Dean, we haven't found anything that will let Alex go back without her risking her life again," Ellen said quietly. "Not one thing on any kind of protection."

He straightened up from the shelf of titles he'd been reading and looked at her. "You're right," he said, half to himself. "And we're running out of time."

Ellen blinked down at the barrel of the Colt automatic that was suddenly in his hand and pointing at her.

"Back," he said clearly to her, gesturing slightly with the gun toward the tables. "Now."

She backed up the aisle between the shelves, glancing over her shoulder as she came to the tables.

"Dean, what the hell are you doing?" Bobby stared at him.

"Alex, get up," Dean said, ignoring him.

"Dean, you drove all this way to find a way to make it safe for her to do this," Jerome said slowly as the barrel moved around the group. "And now, you're just going to risk her life?"

"Looks like," Dean snapped. He gestured to Alex to the hall, and she walked from the table to the doorway. "I'm going to find out what Sam knows. She's going to take a nap and do whatever it is she does to get back there."

"Dean, think about this," Bobby said tightly. "This isn't you!"

"Oh, you're wrong there, Bobby," he said, staring at the old man. "This is very much me. This is how I should've been the whole time. Doing my fucking job."

Ellen glanced past him as Aaron and Ted came into the room, at the edge of the man's peripheral. The gun swivelled smoothly around to point at them.

"You two, in the room."

"Dean, please, we don't have to do it this way." Jerome moved his chair forward a little, stopping as the gun centred on him.

"Yeah, well, we do."

Aaron darted toward him and the barrel shifted smoothly around, the shot cracking in the closed area. Bobby stared as he saw the small black hole in Aaron's shoulder begin to flow red, Ellen, Ted and Chuck running as the wounded man fell to the ground.

"Don't follow us," Dean said tightly. "Don't come near us."

He backed to the door and flicked a glance at the woman behind him. "Fourth door down the hall on your right," he told her sharply, looking back at the people in the library.

As soon as he was around the corner, he turned and strode after Alex, pushing her forward when they reached the door to the office and closing and locking the door behind them. He gestured to the sofa along one wall.

"Lie down, go to sleep," he ordered her and she walked over to the sofa, lying down on it and closing her eyes.

* * *

"What the fuck was that?" Chuck stared up at Ellen from the floor beside Aaron.

Ellen shook her head and knelt beside Aaron, looking at Ted. "Get the med kit, it's in the room behind the kitchen." She looked down at Aaron, seeing his white face, beaded in sweat. "Through and through. We'll get you fixed up."

He nodded and left, walking down the hall as quietly as possible as he passed the office Dean and Alex had entered.

"You think he's flipped?" Chuck asked Bobby.

"No, but something's goin' on and we'd better figure out what," Bobby said sourly. He looked at Jerome. "Any ideas?"

Cas stepped forward. "Gabriel gave him a protection device, from the Horseman," he said quietly. "Rufus told us about it when Dean went off to meet him."

"Some kind of necklace?" Jerome asked immediately.

"I believe so," the angel said.

Jerome nodded. "There's lore about a necklace that Death held, marked with a rune of enchantment. It made the bearer, not invisible but not noticeable." He turned the chair and gestured to the other door. "Oliver, down on the third level, under the fourth Horseman, you'll find a couple of reference books. Bring them up."

Oliver nodded and ran for the hall and the stairs. From the opposite door, Ted returned with the med kit and helped Ellen to cut away Aaron's shirt.

"There were a lot of stories about the side-effects of wearing it for too long," Jerome continued.

"So we need to get this off him?" Bobby asked him. Jerome nodded.

"Can't break the chain either, once it's on. It'll have to be lifted off."

"Peachy." Bobby glanced down at Ellen. "I'm sure he'll sit still for that."

She shrugged, washing out the wound with disinfectant from both sides and setting the sterilised gauze dressings over them. "It'll take practically all of us to take him down, and only if he doesn't start shooting."

"We can't let him go through with this, right?" Chuck looked from her to Bobby and then to Cas. "I mean, she could die in those dreams. Which is dying forever, right?"

* * *

Dean sat in the chair, the gun levelled at Alex. Distantly, in some remote part of his mind, he wondered how easy it was going to be for her to get to sleep at gunpoint, but the thought didn't intrude very far, hitting the smooth, frozen wall that kept the silence in his head.

He noted that her breathing had steadied, and saw her eyes start to move a little beneath the lids as she shifted on the smooth leather upholstery. He needed to know what his brother knew. Needed to know how to take down Lucifer. Needed to know because it was his job to know. Casualties were a part and parcel of war. There was nothing to be done about that.

It was better this way. That's all. Just better not to feel. Not to waste his energy worrying about things he couldn't change and wouldn't want to change. Better not to feel anything.

Alex jerked slightly on the sofa and his attention sharpened on her. He leaned forward a little in the chair, his eyes narrowed as she twisted around. Her eyes flew open, and he started, seeing them seem to stare directly at him. Then she was gone, the sofa empty. And the door to the office burst in, Bobby's .38 hitting his right arm, tearing through the muscle, the automatic dropping to the floor as Chuck, Ted, Oliver and Ellen hit him and pushed him down to the floor. He felt a tug of something around his neck, the scrape of the chain as it was dragged over his head. And exhaustion and hunger and pain and thirst hit him simultaneously as the medallion was thrown to one side.

"What the fuck, Ellen?" he managed to say, struggling against the multiple grips on him.

"That was my line, Dean," she said, pulling him up and looking critically at the hole in his arm. "Can you make a fist?"

He could, just, with a lot of pain. He looked up at her, and his gaze flickered to the empty sofa and the recent memories of what he'd done came back.


	18. Chapter 18 The Blood of God

**Chapter 18 The Blood of God**

* * *

_AN: This update ahead of schedule for Anna, in thanks for a lovely review that's inspired me to keep going. Very appreciated, thank you!_

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Jerome settled his glasses more firmly and tapped the page of the book. "Yes, I thought I'd seen this before. _'The rune of deflection is used on a number of items and aids the bearer in avoiding notice. The rune must be worn against the skin for the field to work correctly, however this is not advisable for longer than a day at a time, as the rune's field also affects the human mind.'_"

He looked over at Dean, sitting in the armchair in his grandfather's office, his face white and exhausted-looking as Ellen applied her second gunshot field dressing for the evening to his arm.

"'_The rune can, over time, remove a person's emotions and narrow their field of focus down to purely practical considerations'_," he continued, then looked back at Dean. "Didn't Death tell you this?"

Dean looked at him blearily. "He might've mentioned something about it."

"And you didn't take it into account?" Bobby asked him disbelievingly.

Lifting the glass in his hand up to his mouth and tipping in a mouthful of the amber contents, Dean didn't answer. The necklace was back in the pocket of his jeans. He didn't want to go over what had happened, or what he'd done while he'd been wearing it.

Chuck glanced at his watch. "How long did Alex disappear for, the last time?"

Dean's brows drew together. "About an hour, I think."

"It's been two now," Chuck pointed out quietly.

"Cas, can you watch for a while?" Bobby said to the angel who nodded. "The rest of us should try and get some sleep."

"No," Dean said, straightening in the chair as Ellen finished the bandage holding the dressings. "I'm fine."

"You're such a long way from fine, boy, you cain't even see it from here," Bobby said sourly, looking at him. "You can stay here, but close your eyes and catch up on all the sleep you missed the last fifty-odd hours."

Dean looked at him stubbornly and Bobby shrugged, turning his chair and wheeling himself out of the office. Ellen followed him, Chuck trailing after her reluctantly. Castiel walked to the other armchair and sat down, his gaze flicking to Dean for a moment.

"I'll watch," he said.

Dean looked at him and shrugged. They'd both watch.

* * *

He came to consciousness with a jolt, the fragment of the dream that had shaken him awake disappearing before he could identify it. Lifting his left hand, he squinted at his watch and the disorientation and grogginess vanished as he registered the time, his gaze going straight to the sofa. It was still empty.

Looking over at the angel, he saw Cas turn to him, shaking his head.

Six hours.

He straightened up in the chair, wincing as he took his weight on his right arm without thinking and the torn muscle protested. "You want to get some sleep, Cas?"

"I'm alright," the angel said, turning his head back to the sofa.

* * *

"It's been ten hours," Chuck said as he came into the room, looking from the empty leather sofa to Dean, the accusation clear in his voice.

Bobby exchanged a glance with Ellen. "We'll give it a bit more time, Chuck."

"She's dead, or in Atlanta," Chuck said flatly. "It was a trap and you sent her into it deliberately."

Dean looked at the sofa.

Chuck shook his head. "You know, I can't believe I ever thought of you as a … hero. You're not a hero, you don't give a crap about anyone but Sam and yourself. You use people up, Dean."

"Chuck, give it a rest," Ellen snapped automatically, her face worried as her gaze shifted to the hunter.

"No," Dean said tiredly, getting up. "He's right."

"He's not," Bobby said, his voice rising slightly.

"I need some fresh air," Dean said, walking out the door and pulling it closed behind him.

Bobby looked over at Chuck. "That doesn't help us."

The writer's face screwed up as he said, "Well, killing off the one person who could reach Sam wasn't such a hot idea either."

"Chuck, go make us some coffee, please." Ellen looked at him and he nodded slowly, turning and walking from the room to the kitchen. She looked back at Bobby. "What now?"

"No idea."

* * *

Dean walked up the stairs and opened the door to the outside, closing it behind him. The illusions fell around him and he stayed at the foot of the stairs that led to the road, dragging in deep lungfuls of air, the acrid scent of wet ash and charred wood filling his nostrils from the woods around. The illusory woods were all still there, but he thought that the real ones had burned with the lightning fires the previous evening.

He had a bad feeling that Chuck was probably right. Dead or in Atlanta.

Right about him, too, he acknowledged, rubbing a hand over his face. He'd known the effects of the necklace. Known it and left it on anyway, so that he wouldn't have to feel the pain in the silence between them. Wouldn't have to feel at all.

Leaning against the earthen wall the steps were cut into, he closed his eyes. The thin morning light made shapes behind his eyelids, some formless, others recognisable. He struggled to draw in the bitter, damp air against the tightness in his chest. Whatever happened, it was on him.

The door opened and he ignored it.

"Dean," Ellen's voice broke into the silence. "She's back."

* * *

Alex sat on the sofa, her hands curled around the cup of coffee. Standing by the door, Dean couldn't see any injuries, but he wasn't close enough to be sure. She wouldn't look at him, wouldn't answer his questions directly, talking to Ellen or Jerome or Bobby. He found he could deal with that, his gaze fixed on her as she looked at the others.

"Sam said that Lucifer could be trapped in a circle of holy oil. It cuts him off from the power of the souls in Hell, and leaves him – not mortal – but not with the strength he has now. He said that the Spear of Destiny can kill him while he's trapped."

"What about Sam?" Dean asked. "What happens to him?"

"He says once Lucifer's trapped in the circle, he has a way to overpower him and if he can walk out of the circle, Lucifer will either die or remain trapped inside," she said to Bobby, shaking her head a little. "He said he learned it from me."

"Did he say what it was?" Ellen looked at her, frowning.

"He said he didn't know what it was, only that he saw me do it," she said slowly, turning to look at the older woman. "I don't know what he means, in the dreams I don't do anything."

"What you do to get into the dreams?" Ellen suggested.

"Or out of them?" Chuck added. "Get back to where you were?"

"I don't know," Alex said, looking into her cup. "I don't know what I'm doing. This time, I went straight there, I don't think I was even properly asleep – I mean, I couldn't –" She stopped abruptly, her eyes flickering in Dean's direction and cutting away. "Getting back, I just turned around and I was here. There wasn't anything I did that was different or special."

"When you disappeared, your eyes were open," Dean said, forcing himself to focus on what he remembered of the last moment before she'd gone. "It didn't look like you were asleep, but it didn't look like you were seeing the room either."

Bobby glanced at him, and back to Alex. "Some kind of psychic power?"

"I've never had anything like that," she said. "Not even a dream that came true, or a hunch …"

Jerome pushed his wheelchair a little closer. "If Sam has seen you do this, then it must be something he can do as well. And perhaps that's the connection. But more importantly, did he say why the Spear could kill Lucifer, if the angel remains in the circle?"

"He said it had the blood of God on it," she said. "It's the spear that was used to kill Christ, isn't it?"

Jerome nodded. "Yes."

"Well, that's just fine and dandy, how the hell are we supposed to find a spear that hasn't been seen for over two thousand years?" Bobby snapped at him.

Jerome turned to him with a faint smile. "Oh, I know where the Spear is, Singer. The difficulty is going to be getting it here, in the time we have available."

"Where is it?" Dean asked him shortly.

"On the most westward of the Cape Verde Islands, in the Atlantic Ocean," Jerome told him.

"In the Verde chapter house?" Ellen shook her head. "There must be at least three thousand miles of ocean between them and us."

"A bit over that, actually," Jerome corrected her. "But they have the Spear, because they were considered the safest of all our homes. They are also the only chapter with a full complement, again due to their isolation, and they have vessels that can bring them here. It's just going to take a couple of months, depending on the winds."

"The winds?" Dean asked, glancing at Bobby.

"Trade winds are finishing," Chuck said, shrugging at him. "Hurricane season will start and then they'll have to cross the Atlantic ridge, which may or may not have bad storms, bad seas."

"Don't they have engines?" Ellen asked him.

"They do, but they won't be able to carry enough fuel to motor the whole way," Jerome said. "The wind is free, and sailing, with a good following wind, they'll make a hundred miles a day, or more."

"Alright," Dean said impatiently. "So they bring this thing to the US, what then?"

"We'll have to send a team to meet them, probably along the Carolina coast since New York is too dangerous now," Jerome said. "Once we have the Spear, you can go to Atlanta."

Dean suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. He could see monstrous great holes in the outline, but he guessed he could probably come up with some contingencies. "But we're on a timetable now, the angels and the trumpets."

"Yes, that will certainly make it all the more challenging," Jerome said, oblivious to the reactions of the hunters in the room at the statement. "The Spear will protect the bearer. From everything that might come against them." He turned his chair slightly. "We've contacted the other chapters and the camps. They all know to make the Mark of God for protection against the angel of the abyss. Unfortunately once Baal has passed over land and sea, there will be precious little left."

"What about the hunters going to the cities?" Dean asked. "Will they have enough of this stuff to protect themselves? Protect the people they're getting out?"

"Let's hope so," Jerome said. "There's nothing we can do about that now."

"In six hours, the second angel will blow their trumpet," Castiel interrupted. "_'And a great mountain, burning with fire, was cast into the sea and a third of the sea became as blood_.' I believe this will be a volcanic eruption, a major one, most likely on the Ring of Fire."

Bobby looked at Jerome. "Likely to set off any of the supers?"

"Yes, that's a distinct possibility. Yellowstone has been waiting, if it comes east. Or there's the one in Indonesia if it heads west."

Dean looked at them. "In English?"

"There are a number of so-called super volcanoes in the world. If the prophecy refers to one of them it will certainly explain the earth being plunged into darkness for a number of days, possibly weeks or months. Even years, depending on which one it is and how much pressure is being held in," Jerome said shortly.

"There's one under Yellowstone Park, and it's overdue for an explosion, at least according to vulcanologists and geologists. It'll probably knock California, Oregon, Washington state and pretty much everything west of the San Andreas fault into the Pacific. It'll likely make the rest of the country uninhabitable as well, at least for a while," Bobby added dourly.

"Awesome," Dean said, rubbing a hand over his jaw. "And there's nothing we can do about that either, is there?"

"No." Jerome sniffed.

"Wait and see," Bobby agreed. "The third trumpet is probably referring to a meteor hit."

"And these are every twenty-four hours?" Chuck asked Castiel. The angel nodded.

"I believe that none of the cataclysms will be enough on their own to destroy the world or make it completely uninhabitable," he told them.

"That's nice." Ellen scowled at him. "Just a combo that'll kill us all slow?"

"Something like that," Cas said, without the slightest trace of irony.

* * *

_**Missouri**_

Rufus looked at Boze as they came out of the industrial shed. Houses and garages and buildings had been pounded, the roofs stove in or crushed or bent by the storm that had passed over them in the night.

"Hail and fire," Boze said quietly, looking around the desolated streets.

"Mingled with blood," Rufus finished, pointing at the bodies that had been flung into what remained of a copse of trees, hands and feet charred, blood slowly dripping down the shattered trunks. "We have to get moving."

Boze nodded uncomfortably. "Got another two days to Austin."

"Two more angels, two more horns," Rufus said sourly, turning back inside. "Good times."

* * *

_**Nebraska**_

Emmett scowled at the torn and flapping ribbons of canvas that were all that remained of the tarp roof of the truck. Behind him, Max was checking over the boxes of ammunition.

"Need to replace this," he said. She looked up at him and nodded.

"We could go back to Lincoln?"

"No, no going back to anywhere, what's ahead?"

"Kearney?" She glanced at the sodden map beside her. "Next big city is Denver."

"We'll check Kearney," Emmett decided. "We'll just replace the truck with something with a hard top if we need to."

"Ordnance's fine," Max commented, getting to her feet and pushing her short, blonde hair back from her face. "We got another two days, full driving on the road, if we have no problems getting through."

"Hell for leather, Max," Emmett said, helping her to load the boxes back into the truck bed. "Martin'll take point coming up to Denver, see if it's passable."

"We should have gone further south," she said. "It's too close to Boulder."

"I think Boulder'll have other things to worry about by the time we get there."

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Dean sat to one side of the library, a book open on the table next to him, watching Bobby and Ellen. When they'd been working out what was going and what to do next, they'd been the same way he'd always known them, hard as nails and arguing with each other and prickly. But that had changed and he couldn't put his finger on the difference.

Ellen was … softer, he thought, watching her move around behind Bobby, her hand resting lightly on his shoulder for a moment as she passed him. He'd seen her smile at the hunter, seen an expression in her face that he almost didn't recognise, belatedly remembering it from their first meeting, when she'd spoken of his father. It was a warm, understanding expression.

And Bobby was smiling, actually _smiling_, at her. He looked back down at the book at his elbow. They were suited to each other, both knowing the depths of pain and, he guessed, the highs that had preceded them. They were both pragmatic. Unsentimental but feeling things deeply, keeping those feelings hidden most of the time. He glanced back to see Ellen stop behind the wheelchair, looking at something over Bobby's shoulder, her hand curled gently around the back of his neck. Definitely something.

On the other side of the room, Alex was sitting with Chuck and Jerome, studying some text, looking for the way she was able to get to Sam. He needed to get back to the camps. He didn't want her to come. She would be safe here, with them. She would be safe and he could stop worrying and thinking about her, and maybe what he was pretending not to feel would fade away on its own.

"When did you want to leave?" Ellen said beside him and he jerked his gaze around to her.

"As soon as we find out if the country is toast, or not, I guess," he said, looking back at the book.

"Doesn't give you much time to get back to Michigan." She sat down in the chair close by.

"Won't be any point going back if everything's blown to hell, will there?" he countered, wondering what Ellen actually wanted to talk about. He glanced at her, seeing her looking at the small group across the room.

"What's going on with you and Bobby?" he asked, partly to divert her attention, partly because she might say something. Bobby wouldn't.

She looked at him and smiled. "None of your business."

He shrugged. "Looks like you two are happier."

"Maybe," she allowed softly. "Alex said that you had a falling out in the car. Is that why you kept the necklace on, Dean?"

He looked at her steadily, not answering. After a moment, she dropped her gaze, huffing out a soft sigh.

"She doesn't want to stay here," she said, turning to look back at the group. "She wants to go back with you."

He shook his head. "She'll be better off here."

"Will she?" Ellen looked back at him. "Or will it be better for you?"

"She'll be safer here," he said, his voice hardening. "She said she had no trouble getting out of that dream in here. Maybe she can keep talking to Sam."

"Not me you're going to have to argue with, Dean," Ellen said, the corner of her mouth curving up.

* * *

The roller woke them at midnight, shaking the walls and rattling the pictures, knocking lamps to the floor and crashing the china in the pantries. It wasn't the blast wave that they'd feared.

"Somewhere in the Pacific, I think," Jerome said an hour later. "Heading west."

"How do you know?" Dean looked at the bank of computer screens.

"Geophysical satellites are still recording and transmitting data from the field," Jerome said, tapping one of the screens. "Took a while to hack into them, but Michel is a gifted programmer and he got there in the end. He's relaying these images to us."

The screen showed a bright red dot, north east of Japan, with concentric circles ebbing from it, the colours decreasing in intensity as they travelled outward from the epicentre.

"This is the west coast," Jerome continued, tapping another screen. "If the fault stresses enough with the chain reaction, we'll see it here in an hour."

"You should get going, Dean," Bobby said, looking up at him. "In a couple of days, there's going to be ash falls and maybe dust storms, not the best visibility and it'll probably slow you down."

He nodded, turning around. Alex wasn't there. Maybe he could get going before she knew what was happening.

He walked to the door fifteen minutes later. The car had been loaded with boxes from the order's store rooms, the ingredients and other things he'd need for Atlanta. He wasn't sure when he'd be able to get back.

"You staying?" he asked Cas, seeing the angel stop at the door.

"Yes, for the moment." The angel looked down at the group below them. "I can call on help here, more safely than at the camps. And I'll find a way to get back before you go."

Dean nodded and walked outside. The illusions wavered for a moment, until the door closed behind him, then solidified. The forests were lashing in the strong winds that had been blowing all night, and the wet ash smell was still overpowering as he climbed the steps to the road.

The Impala had withstood the hail storm and lightning strikes well, a few dents on the roof and hood, but that was all the damage he'd found. Dean stopped as he saw Alex sitting in the passenger seat, her head tipped back and her eyes closed.

He opened the door and got in, putting the key in the ignition and resting his fingers on it, but not starting the engine.

"You should stay here."

"No." She didn't look at him, the word enunciated clearly.

"You'll be safe here," he said.

"No."

He thought about arguing or telling her to get out of the car, or knocking her out and carrying her back inside. He wasn't going to do any of those things, he thought to himself dryly. He turned the key and the engine rumbled to life and he twisted around in the seat, looking behind them as he made the turn to head out.

* * *

_**Nevada**_

"Jesus wept!" Emmett dragged the wheel to one side as the ground split in front of them, across the road and into the flat desert to either side of them, the earth rumbling and creaking and groaning as it widened.

Behind them, the two cars skidded out, narrowly missing ploughing into the back of the truck or each other. Emmett leaned out the window, making wide, swinging gestures and they turned, backing away from the crack and letting Emmett back fifty yards from it as well.

"Any way around?" he barked at Max who was looking at the map.

"Not with the vehicles, we're humping our gear from here."

She looked through the dusty windshield. Vegas was twenty miles away, the tops of the buildings inverted in the mirage heat.

"That's a long way to hump ourselves, a ton of gear and then bring over a thousand people back out again," Emmett commented, following her gaze.

"Straight up."

"Shit." He stopped the engine and opened the door, swinging down from the high cab.

Max's eyes narrowed as she watched him walk to the edge of the split, her fingers tightening their hold on the map edge unconsciously, relaxing as he turned away and walked back.

"No way," he said sourly. "Alright, let's get unloaded and figure what we can carry and what has to be left behind."

She nodded and folded up the map, sliding it back into the pocket of her small pack. Jobs sometimes went south like this. Didn't mean anything. Just having to think of a different, more efficient way of achieving the same purpose. Sliding out of the truck cab, she pulled the pack after her and turned for the back.

* * *

_**Austin, Texas**_

Rufus lowered the binoculars and sighed. Lucifer had been making some modifications. He supposed it was too much to ask that everything was pretty much the same as the last two hits.

Boze slid a sideways glance at him. "Well?"

"Well, we ain't sneakin' those folks out of here," Rufus admitted acerbically, looking along the horizon to the west. All morning they'd been watching a monstrous dust cloud heading their way.

"We might be able to use that," he said slowly. Boze turned his head and looked at the cloud.

"Likely to limit us as much as them," he said.

Rufus shook his head. "No, I got an idea."

* * *

At dusk, the cloud rolled over the city, filling the streets with red clay and white sand particles, scouring the metal and stone with the force of the wind, driving every living thing into shelter.

Under the city, Rufus walked along the concrete sewer pipes steadily, the miner's helmet lighting the way in front of him. He carried a small duffle full of demon bombs, a Remington pump action loaded with salt and iron filing packed shells and the modified Uzi 9mm machine gun, loaded with carefully cast and engraved iron rounds. His boots slapped through the trickle of water that ran along the base of the tunnel and behind him he could hear the others, sloshing along in time.

At the junction, he stopped and gestured to the tunnel to the left. Rona and Martin took it, moving carefully along the narrower tunnel. He and Boze turned right. Sandra was sitting up top, tucked into the leading bus parked in the bus depot's massive hangar-like building.

The slave compound was in the centre of the business district. Two tunnels went under it. Right under it, Rufus thought, and in one of those happy coincidences, back under the bus depot as well. The tunnel he and Boze were in led under the biggest and oldest bank in Austin. The bank the demons had decided to use as their quarters.

"Walk in the park," he remarked softly to Boze. The hunter grinned back.

They reached the street address of the bank, clearly painted on the sewer's concrete pipe and found the access hatch to the sub-basement. Franklin had provided a dozen remote controlled mines. The power cables were in the basement and like most financial institutions that carried a lot of cash, in the event of a power failure, the bank was locked up tight by its emergency source. The locks had been replaced with electronically operated ones ten years ago. It was amazing what the local county offices could tell you about every building in their districts, Rufus thought, smiling to himself.

In the basement, they laid out the mines, under the incoming and outgoing cables, around the emergency generators, under the foundation piers of the building. Crawling back into the sewer pipes, they counted off a hundred yards, turned around and detonated the mines. Boze's eyes widened as they saw the rolling cloud of dust and smoke coming for them along the pipe, and they both turned and ran, coughing and spitting as the cloud overtook them, the fine dust filling their mouths and noses and lungs, even through the damp underground air.

* * *

Sandra watched the man-hole cover open at the front of the hangar and she got out of the bus, heaving it back and helping out the first of the Austin slaves, pointing to the buses and pressing close to them to tell them to get on board. She asked each of them if they could drive a bus, and was rewarded by several confirmations as the people poured out of the narrow vent. Drivers were directed to their buses and she reached out a hand to pull Martin out as he came up halfway through the count.

Outside the hangar, the dust storm raged on, leaving piles of dirt and sand drifting over the streets and buildings, blotting out the night sky and coating everything in a thin, pervasive skin of fine red clay.

Rufus slung his duffle onto the bus and turned at the door to look at Boze. "Sandy and Rona say we got everyone."

Boze grinned at him. "And what do you think they'll say when they finally get the doors of the bank open and go to look in the slave quarters?" He put his hands up to his mouth in mock horror, eyes wide and staring. "MICE!"

Rufus laughed, turning to get on his bus and close the doors. It'd been one of those jobs that Dean would've gotten a laugh out of, he thought. He'd have to think of a good way to retell it on the way back. The man needed something to lighten his day.

* * *

_**Illinois**_

Dean looked up through the windshield worriedly. The day was getting darker and darker and he couldn't see a reason for it, no cloud visible, the sun was there, just dimming. Somehow.

The dust storm had rolled over them from the west the day before yesterday and the roads were still partially blocked and slippery from the debris it'd left behind it, requiring all his attention to get through them safely. He'd have to pull the goddamned engine completely apart to clean it all out when they got back, he thought, glancing up again.

Flicking on the headlights made little difference. It was getting darker and it was more like the light was being sucked from every luminal source than something was blocking them. The thought gave him a bad feeling. He looked at Alex, curled silently into the corner of the car, the blanket over one shoulder. He didn't know if she was awake or sleeping.

He thought the fourth trumpet might be the darkening of the day and night. Ellen had called it an eclipse, but it wasn't. They weren't going to make it back to camp before the fifth angel blew his trumpet, he realised. They'd have to find somewhere to protect themselves before Baal was released. And they'd have to do it fast, because the angel responsible for the current situation must have blown his horn at least ten hours ago.

The interstate had been the quickest way home, the medallion warm against his skin, worn for a few hours, then taken off and left on the seat, then worn again. His memories were sharp and vivid and not easily shoved down, stirring a constant litany of guilt and might-have-beens through his gut.

The car slewed in a loose pile of sand and dirt and he pulled his attention back to the road, feeling the tyres begin to lose traction in the soft pile, easing back off the accelerator and shifting down to try and get more torque, to use the car's weight. They moved a little further forward and stopped again, the wheels kicking out the dirt behind them.

_Fuck._ He stopped and pulled on the brake, leaving the engine running, opening the door and getting out. They were on an elevated stretch of road, and he could see the darkness gathering everywhere, the sun still visible, a blood red disc in the corner of the indigo sky, the lights of the car murky and showing little of the long drift in front and behind them. Leaning over, he saw that the wheels were up to the hubs in soft, shifting earth, none of even remotely compacted.

_Sonofabitch._

Leaning back into the car, he turned off the engine and grabbed the keys, going around to the trunk to get out a shovel. The tool bit into the earth easily and he threw it clear, but as each shovel-load was removed another load slid down the crumbling slope to take its place. And he couldn't see much at all now.

_Admit it_, he snarled at himself, opening the trunk and throwing the shovel back in. _We're stuck here_.

He felt around for the mason jar of paste Jerome had given him when they'd left, shutting the trunk lid and opening the rear door to stand on the frame. Gabriel's sigil was clear in his mind and he painted it over the glossy black roof by feel, barely able to see his hand, let alone the design.

When it was done, he couldn't see anything, screwing the lid back on the jar by touch, setting it into the back of the car on the floor and closing the rear door. Walking back around the car with a hand running over the side panels, he got back to the driver's door and got in, closing the door and slumping behind the wheel.

"The fourth angel?" Alex's voice came out of the blackness beside him. "How long between the darkness and the release of the angel of the abyss?"

"I don't know," Dean said. It was disorienting to be talking to someone less than three feet away, staring wide-eyed into pitch blackness, unable to see them. She hadn't sounded angry though, or cold. Just … neutral.

"Is there anything else we can do?"

"No," he said. "Just wait."

He heard her soft exhale. Either the protection would work or they'd die. Fifty-fifty.

"Alex … I'm sorry."

"I know."

He waited, hoping she'd say more, but that was all there was.

* * *

_**Las Vegas, Nevada**_

The town had been spared the earthquakes, the buildings were intact and the power was still on, every light in the city flashing, blinking, rippling or pulsing gaudily, in every possible colour and every conceivable rhythm. Emmett walked down the street and looked around, seeing the buildings standing mostly empty. Hard to get the old feel of the place without the crowds, he thought.

The roads into the city were a different story, humped and cracked, split across or twisted over, they were all impassable and it left him with the ongoing problem of getting the people out once they'd taken down the opposition. Assuming that with their much reduced ordnance, they would able to take down the opposition, Emmett thought. He let out a breath and glanced back at Max, jerking his head to a brightly neon-lit church to the right. They turned up the path and found the building lit up but empty. Like most of the others.

"We'll have a look around first, see where everyone is," he said as they dumped their gear bags and ran the salt lines around the entrances and windows and vents.

"Franklin, you and Risa take the western end, Max and me'll cover this end. Mark, you're on guard duty. Stay here, be inconspicuous, don't let anyone steal our toys."

They nodded and headed out again, splitting up at the sidewalk.

* * *

Two hours later they'd been through most of the eastern side of the town and found nada. He followed Max into one of the office buildings, climbing the stairs after her and going to the windows of the top-most floor. They pulled out their field glasses and starting searching from the top, quadrant by quadrant.

Max tapped Emmett's shoulder lightly. He turned and looked in the direction she was viewing. The airport was lit up as brightly as the rest of the city, except for the main terminal. It was dark.

Turning to look at her, he saw her mouth lift at one corner.

"They didn't change their procedures here."

"Probably thought we wouldn't try this far west, with Death stomping earthquakes around," she remarked.

"Well, let's go talk to them," Emmett said, getting to his feet.

* * *

Emmett nodded to Max as she slid through the shadows to the front door of the church. She whistled once, a low, two-tone whistle which was answered from inside. The door opened and they walked in.

"Found the demon nest," Franklin said, glancing over his shoulder as he poured himself a cup of coffee. "They've taken over the Grand."

"How do you want to contain them?" Emmett walked up to him, taking a cup and helping himself to one as well.

"Thought we'd use the reservoir and light some fires on certain floors," Franklin told him. "The holy water to drive them down to the casino level, and then a half dozen demon bombs to fry them in situ."

"Can we launch those?" Max looked at him in surprise.

"We can now," Franklin said with a smile. "Modified the missiles to take the cylinders instead their usual payload, adjusted the weights. Good to go."

"Good, that'll help with Atlanta as well," Emmett said, knuckling his eyes as he fought back sixteen hours of no rest. "Well, we've got good news. We'll be going out of here in style."

Rona looked at him quizzically. "Yeah? How's that?"

"You'll see," Emmett said comfortably. "Hope no one's got a phobia about flying."

* * *

"Is it just me or is it getting darker?" Max squinted at the sky uneasily.

"Not just you," Emmett said tensely. "Fourth trumpet. We're going to lose all light for about eight hours."

"Fabulous." She turned to look down the runway at the two jumbos that were sitting at the end.

They'd trapped and exorcised the demons who were guarding the slaves without issue the previous evening, and Max had done a rough count while Emmett had gone through the crowd, talking to them, letting them know the rough outline. Just under a thousand here, but time was running out and they still had no idea how to get them out and across the desert before the archdemon was released. Emmett had walked back to her with four men following and had introduced them. All four were commercial pilots, grounded when the virus had struck, rounded up when Lucifer's demons had taken over. And the passenger jets at the end of the runway were theirs. Well, theirs to fly anyway. Fully fuelled and ready to go. With no baggage, the men had thought they could get everyone out, just, on the weight allowed.

It would be harder to do it total darkness, she thought. Harder still to do it with an archdemon buzzing them. She picked up her bag and walked down the long runway, heading for the planes.

"How long do we have to blow them?" Mark looked at Franklin.

"Ten minutes," Franklin snapped. "We haven't contained them by then, we'll have to run and leave it." He glanced up at the sky, which was dimming. "We're gonna have bigger problems."

They hoisted the Stingers and loaded them, taking aim. The first missiles would set off the fires, and bring on the sprinklers. Five minutes was all Franklin had allocated to hit the casino with the demon bombs. Then the building's foundation on the western side would blow, knocking the whole thing down. If the Devil hadn't protected his people sufficiently, the angel of the abyss would handle the stragglers.

Mark looked through the scope at the twenty-fifth floor and squeezed the trigger.

* * *

_**Illinois**_

"I think it's getting lighter," Dean said, staring at his hand.

"What's that noise?"

He heard Alex shift on the seat, looking out through the back window, possibly. He could hear it too, a low, buzzing noise, something between the distant drone of a jet in wide-sky country and a phone on vibrate on a hardwood floor.

"Can you see anything?"

"No."

The wind hit the car first, like a fist, shifting them across two lanes to hit another pile of dirt and sand. Dean grabbed the wheel, his hand reaching out blindly for Alex who was thrown into him. It shrieked and whistled around them, and he could feel the body of the car shaking with its force, every panel oscillating at high speed as they were pushed up the side of the pile. Another two lanes and they'd be pushed over the edge, he realised, pulling on the handbrake, putting the car into gear and slamming his foot on the brake. It slowed them a little.

The buzzing got louder, and they both recognised the insectile drone at the same time. The cloud of chittering, winged creatures rose above the railing of the road like a wave, sweeping into them and over them, the car's windows smashing one after the other as the weight of the swarm pressed against them, filling the interior with the noxious smell of dry, dead places. Dean dragged Alex down to lie against the back of the front seat, shifting himself to lie over her, his arms over his head, pulling the blanket she'd had around her over both of them.

None of the insects entered but the wind howled around the inside of the car, cold fingers plucking at them, scraping exposed skin with the debris it'd picked up, filling the space with dust and noise.

Dean felt the car moving again, inching up the soft, crumbling slope of the drift. He felt around the seat under him, fingers searching for the small metal disc he'd dropped there earlier.

"What are you doing?" Alex's voice was muffled against his neck.

"Looking for the medallion," he said, almost having to shout it beside her ear. "Whatever this is might not see us as easily if I'm wearing it."

He felt her move her arms down, wriggling under him and turning over as she slid her fingers down in the join between the seat and the back.

"Here," she said, her fingers pressing against his chest, something hard in them digging into him.

He took the disc and found the chain, dragging it awkwardly one-handed over his head. The medallion dropped and he found it under the collar of his jacket, tucking it into his shirt.

The wind disappeared instantly, the insects still swarming over the car, their buzzing almost as loud.

"How long is this going to last?" Alex asked him.

"I don't know," he admitted, shifting up the length of the seat until he could straighten his legs. "Until everyone who isn't protected is dead, I guess."

* * *

He tucked his head down, feeling her shoulder with his chin. The blanket muffled the sounds of the insects somewhat, blocked out the smell of them less effectively. He'd shifted his weight to one side, chest and shoulder and arm still over her, but the rest of him on his side.

"You alright?" he asked quietly. He heard and felt her draw in a breath, her ribs rise under his arm.

"No, I don't think I can honestly say that," she said, the words small huffs of air against his cheek.

Her dry tone made him smile a little.

"Why did you keep the medallion on?" she asked a moment later and he closed his eyes, not knowing what to say to her.

"Dean?"

"I, uh, I thought it would be safer," he answered, wincing inwardly at the lie, at the fact that he was lying.

In the darkness, he listened to her breathing. She didn't say anything else and after a while he heard that soft respiration change, slow and deepen and he knew she'd fallen asleep.

It hadn't been what he'd wanted to say, but he didn't think she wanted to hear that.

* * *

The swarm took thirty-six hours to pass over them. Dean heard the sound moving away and pulled the blanket back, blinking as he watched the sky turn to gold in the west through the empty space where the rear window had been, streamers of cloud outlined in pink and lavender and crimson. He sat up, pushing the blanket back off them, and looked around.

The land was bare and scorched, black and grey where the swarm had passed. He leaned over the back seat and pulled out a bottle of water from the small ice box there, unscrewing the lid and tipping a little into Alex's mouth. She opened her eyes and took the bottle from him, gulping it down.

Getting out of the car, he saw that the wind had scoured the drift from under them, had swept everything from the interstate's long concrete stretch, the guard rails bent and buckled here and there, possibly from something being pushed over the side.

No green. His eyes searched the country surrounding them but he couldn't find a shred of green anywhere. Houses that had been left empty or had been tombs for their owners were gone, the foundations filled with pools of water, reflecting the sunset sky.

What the hell had happened to the camps, he wondered, his stomach churning as memories of the last two nights resurfaced. And to Emmett and Rufus and Boze, on the road with the survivors from Austin and Vegas?

Alex slid across the seat and opened the passenger door, sending a shower of glass onto the road. She noticed the lack of life immediately, and thought of the crops, of the gardens and orchards, everything they'd grown would be gone. What were they going to eat for the next year?

Silently, they turned back to the car, sweeping the last of the glass from the windows from the seats and floor onto the road, getting back in. Dean turned the key, relieved when the engine started up. The cool air blew through the car and he kept the speed down, taking the first off ramp to look for someplace he could do at least temporary repairs.

* * *

_**30,000 feet above Illinois**_

"Where we're gonna land these birds?" Emmett looked at Travis, the pilot sitting in front of him.

"No idea," Travis said with a shrug. "Guessing Detroit's out?"

Max made a face. "Yeah, ghouls and croaties, junk and burned out everything."

"What about Grand Rapids?" Emmett thought of the near empty town. "Are the runways long enough?"

"Yeah, we can make an emergency landing there," Travis glanced at Marsh, his co-pilot. "Got a good central runway there from memory?"

Marsh nodded. "Adjusting course."

The planes had taken off in the dying light in Vegas and lifted into the air, the people on board cheering as they'd climbed higher. Flying over the Rockies with no light at all hadn't been so much fun, Emmett thought, remembering the long tension of wondering if they'd dropped below the level of the mountains and their trip would end in an fiery explosion as they slammed into the side of one. He got the feeling the pilots hadn't been as relaxed about it as they'd seemed at the time, Marsh excusing himself as soon as the light returned to the sky the next day to throw up violently in the forward head.

But somehow they'd made it. Then had come the insects.

Two of the slaves held in Vegas were entymologists. They'd said they were locusts, an extinct species. He didn't care. They filled the skies but left the planes alone, the huge sigils of Gabriel that Max had painted over the fuselage keeping them off. The wind hadn't been so easy to dodge.

"Where are we?" Max looked past Marsh at the land beneath them.

"Over Illinois. Grand Rapids'll take another hour."

"So … just landing to look forward to," Emmett tried to smile.

* * *

_**Indiana**_

Rufus stood beside the windows of the office, staring down at the train yard. He knew it was there, somewhere, but he couldn't see the ground, couldn't see the rails or the overturned carriages. The thick, moving cloud of black wings obscured everything.

They'd pulled in when the light had started going, the big train shed large enough to accommodate all twenty-three buses, and had painted the shed and the buses over with the sigil of Gabriel, archangel of death, of vengeance and revelation. That had been fifteen hours ago.

Outside, the locusts were still swarming, the sky black with them, the sun hidden. He'd seen a regular swarm once, when he'd been a kid, visiting the mid-west with his mother to see some old family friend who'd been dying. The crops had been at their peak, another few days to harvest and the locusts had flown in, in numbers that had blotted out the sun and sky, just like this. But then, it had only lasted a couple of hours. And when they'd gone, not one leaf or seed or pod had remained. He wasn't looking forward to seeing what would be left after this endless, voracious swarm had finally passed over.

Boze walked up to him, his thoughts apparently on the same track. "Where the hell we going to find enough food to feed everyone if these things leave nothing?"

He shook his head. "No idea. We've got more seed, Alex and Renee made sure of that, but it's almost April."

Boze leaned against the wall. "Do you think he can do it?"

"Dean?" Rufus turned to look at him. "I think he's probably the only one who can," he said thoughtfully. "Not because of destiny or any of that crap, Boze. That's just … the window dressing. I think Dean'll do it because of Sam, because it's his brother and he won't let that go."

He ran a hand over his head wearily. "He can be hard. But there's a thick streak of … I don't know what it is … compassion, maybe. Understanding … maybe. I don't know. It makes him unpredictable. To some people. Makes him an unknown to the demonspawn. They think they changed him. Think they reprogrammed him. But they didn't. And they, especially Lucifer, they don't know that."

"We might have some problems, down the line," Boze said softly.

Rufus looked at him questioningly.

"There was a lot of talk from the demons, in Boulder, Emmett said. Lucifer's put a price on his head."

Rufus snorted. "He's had that since he was old enough to drink legal."

"This is different," Boze said, shaking his head. "He's got the devil shook up enough to tell the civilians as well. You know, as well as I do, sooner or later some sap is going to come after him for what they promise."

"Well, they'll have to find him first," Rufus said derisively. "And that ain't all that easy."

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Dean stood on the wall at Tawas and watched the cars pouring in along the road, too many to fit into the compound, the drivers and passengers parking along the side of the road and walking up to the camp gates.

He looked down into the milling throng and saw Emmett, climbing down the ladder and striding through the crowd to meet him.

"Seriously, Emmett? Where the hell did all the cars come from?"

Emmett turned and grinned at him. "Long term lot at Grand Rapids airport. We got ourselves four pilots and flew home. Well," he added, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the city to the south-west. "As close to home as we could."

Dean shook his head disbelievingly. "How was Vegas?"

"Shaky," Max said, appearing at Emmett's elbow. "No roads in or out anymore."

"And we blessed the entire water supply," Franklin added, coming up to them. "So what's this about a spear?"

"Fill you in later," Dean said, seeing Liev standing on the steps. "Gotta get a few things sorted out."

He threaded his way through the increasing crowd to the builder, climbing the steps.

"Dean," Liev nodded to him.

"We got enough room for all these people, Liev?" he asked, gesturing behind him.

"Not really, but we'll fit them in."

"You haven't had the locusts here," Dean said, looking around. It wasn't so much a question, the place was untouched, still green everywhere. They hadn't been able to believe it when they'd driven in.

"No, we were talking to the others – heard from Bobby that Kansas got hit, and from Jerome that his people had all had it. We got the spell of darkness, Father Michael said the church was full for that one, but the Fallen must've turned off before they got here."

_And that's not creepy at all_, Dean thought uneasily. "I don't think we'll get away with it."

"No," Liev agreed. He looked at the buildings. "We're ready. The whole place is wrapped in the sigils and the stock and everything we could glean from the farms is already under cover."

Dean nodded. "Emmett said they brought out just under a thousand. No idea about Rufus and Boze, but you can double that, I guess, at least."

The builder nodded. "We'll need another camp, or we'll need to fortify the town."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The kitchen was full of a mellow, golden light, the afternoon sun pouring through the windows, the cream paintwork reflecting it, the warm timber absorbing it. Dean sat at the long pine table, looking across it to Alex. She was writing down the latest arrival figures and he noticed suddenly that her hair had grown out long enough to be pulled back, the fall spilling down past her shoulders, the sunshine lighting it to a mix of shades of gold and red and maple.

"If Rufus and Boze bring in another thousand, we've got around four and a half thousand in the camps," she said, staring down at her figures. "Our stores can last for maybe another six weeks, with rationing, and that's dependant on what happens when Baal crosses us."

She looked up at him, and he saw the deep worry in her eyes. "We can plant again, as soon as the plagues have passed, I think. But whether it will grow, or if there's enough time for everything to grow … I mean, on a small scale, we won't starve. But we're talking severe rationing, for most of the year."

He exhaled softly. "Yeah, well, if we don't kill the devil in Atlanta, that's going to be irrelevant anyway." He rubbed his forehead absently. "And we'll have the game, and the fish, won't we?"

"The lake is dead, Dean," Alex said, shaking her head. "At least what I've been able to get samples from. We're using the well, and Lake Tawas is still alright, but Huron and Solitude were … not poisoned, I think, but there's nothing living in them now." She looked out through the windows. "And I called Jerome. Every living thing, he told me the prophecy says. We might not have anything to fall back on."

"Yeah, the party never stops, here in the Apocalypse." He shoved the thoughts of next year aside for the moment. "Me and Cas, and Maggie, I think, will have to go down to Atlanta. I have to see the city, see what he's been doing down there before we take an army in."

She looked back at him and he caught some expression in her face, there and then gone as she dropped her gaze. "What about the Spear?"

"I'll send a team to the coast," he said. "Jo, Ty, Michael and Risa can bring it back from there." He smiled humourlessly. "At least they shouldn't have any problems with the croats."

"No," she agreed. "There's that."

* * *

"Jo, you and Ty, Michael and Risa'll go to the coast," Dean said, looking at the slender hunter beside him. "The boat should be there in about four weeks. Jerome says the Spear protects the bearer, so it should help with getting back."

"Maggie, Cas and me'll check out Atlanta," he continued, turning to the angel and hunter. "Everyone else stays and watches. Baal didn't miss us by accident. He'll be back. When it passed over us, it took thirty-six hours. People are going to freak out. Make sure no one freaks out enough to endanger themselves or anyone else."

"Have we heard from Rufus?" Maurice looked at Dean.

"No."

The radio silence wasn't surprising. It was hard enough to get Kansas sometimes, if the atmospherics weren't right. They'd just have to wait … and hope. And pray, if it came to that, he thought.

The office cleared slowly and Dean stood by the window, wondering what else he could do to try to ensure everyone stayed safe … safer.

"Dean."

He turned around, seeing Jo standing in the room. "Yeah?"

"I need to ask you something," she said, looking past him to the window.

He looked at the expression on her face, awkward but determined, and sighed inwardly.

"Sure."

"Uh … I wanted to ask you about Ty," she said, her eyes cutting to the side.

_Lie number one_, he thought. "What about him?"

"What do you think of him?"

_Uh huh_.

"He's a good guy, Jo," he said, leaning back against the desk, folding his arms as he looked at her. "Good hunter too."

"Yeah." She tilted her head slightly. "He is, and we get on, pretty well. And he wouldn't mind a more personal relationship."

"That's good, isn't it?" he asked her, wishing he was somewhere else. Anywhere else would do.

"The thing is," she said slowly, lifting her gaze to meet his eyes. "I'd rethink that if I thought there was a chance for … well, for us."

Repressing the desire to look away, he held her gaze unwillingly but steadily. "There isn't. At all."

He'd met her at a time when it was second nature to hit on her, but his father's death had prevented it. And by the time he'd found a way to deal with that, he'd known her too well to just treat it as something casual. And he'd known her mother too well. The truth was that he hadn't been able to see past the girl in pigtails, the girl who let her emotions lead her, who was smart enough to figure out the jobs, but not … hard enough to do the work. Not really. Not even now. Jo hunted on her nerves, much of the time, reacting. They all did to a certain extent, he guessed. But it wasn't a good way to get to old age in their business.

He watched her gaze drop, watched her absorb his decision. He couldn't tell her that he didn't want to be someone's teacher, or student. He didn't want to be with someone where that was a part of it. Didn't want to be with someone who didn't at least want to know him, inside and out … the good, the bad and the ugly. He wanted something else. He didn't know exactly what that was yet. But he wanted someone … else.

Jo nodded. "We're heading out in an hour."

"Be careful near the coast, there were a lot of red zones there," he said, keeping his voice matter-of-fact. "Not sure if the croats will survive the locusts, but the ghouls probably will have and all the other scavengers. You taking a car that's got the angel protection?"

"Yeah, Ty found a Humvee that the Vegas people got in Grand Rapids, sigils painted over the roof, doors and hood," she said, grimacing slightly, glad that her voice sounded dry and even.

"Sounds about right," he said. He straightened up, remembering how the weight of the swarm had smashed the Impala's windows suddenly. "And get Terry to cut you some panels to the size of the windows. Ours got smashed out by the weight of the swarm, even though they didn't break through."

"Yeah, okay," she said, nodding. "Well, we'll see you in a while."

She turned and walked to the door. He watched her go, then looked back over the desk behind him.

He needed to talk to Liev and Terry about coverings for the windows of the buildings, of any vehicles that were being left outside, he thought. Something else to worry about, getting replacements for his car's windows. Vincent would probably know what automotive glass places were around the area. He needed to replace them as fast as he could.

* * *

Baal swept down the east coast three days later … and the sun became as sackcloth, and the moon became as blood and the seas boiled and the skies fell.

The noise was a lot worse in the big house, Dean thought. With the panels over the windows and the glass panes of the doors, the interior felt claustrophobic, even with the generators running and the fires lit and roaring up the chimneys. The wind came from across Lake Huron, a bullet train of howls and shrieks and long, low moans as it curled around the buildings, looking for weaknesses, looking for chinks and holes to come inside. It levelled the trees and tore them up, tossing them high in the air and dropping them over the gardens and the crops. The swarm followed its path, devouring everything that wasn't warded, the grass and the plants and the trees and the animals, stripping it all down to the ground and leaving nothing behind but bare earth, in some places not even that where the soil covered the rock too thinly and was swept away.

Moving around the house, he tried to reassure the people huddled together, men and women and children who'd already lived through the homicidal fury of the virus, the attack of demons, slavery and near-starvation. Their wide eyes stared at him, faces drawn and white as the angel of the abyss led his army past and over them. There was no reassurance he could give, nothing he could say to counteract their imaginations, to stop the house from shaking on its foundations, to stop them from thinking about what there would be left to eat when the swarm had moved on.

Climbing the stairs, he checked on the bedrooms, one by one, starting with the attics and then moving along the gallery hall. It would be days before the Fallen finally left and every room had food and water and blankets, the consensus being that people wouldn't be able to do much in the waiting time, and wouldn't necessarily feel like moving from a place they found safe.

At the end of the hall, he knocked on Alex's door loudly, opening it when he couldn't hear a response over the rattling drone of the swarm and piercing scream of the wind. Alex was in there, sitting cross-legged on her bed, the ledgers piled up in front of her. She looked up as he walked in.

"Sorry, didn't think you'd heard me," he said.

"I didn't."

"You alright?" he asked her, walking over to the edge of the bed.

"Hard to concentrate," she said, gesturing to the exterior wall. "But yeah, at least I've got room to move around here."

He smiled slightly. "You think I get so many opportunities to throw myself over a damsel in distress, I'm gonna ignore one when it comes up?"

"I wasn't in distress," she told him dryly.

"Sure you were. You just blocked it out."

"Must have." She looked past him to the hall. "Everyone holding up okay?"

He made a vague gesture. "As well as I'd expect them to. It's easy to forget everything they had to go through to get here, and then this …"

"Yeah."

He looked around the room. It was quite plain. The furniture was old, the wood rubbed to a soft, satin patina from years of use. Books and notepads covered most of the horizontal surfaces, a bowl of freshly cut flowers the only indication that the occupant was female. An old gramophone, standing on the dresser, with a small number of LPs upright beside it, drew his attention and he walked over to look through them. Blues. A few classical. A couple of American folk albums. And a selection of American and British bands from the sixties and seventies. His mouth curved up unconsciously as he recognised cover after cover. The title of the last reminded him of Boze's comments at Christmas, wanting to settle down.

"Boze told me he was thinking about having a family, when we're done with the devil," he said, looking over his shoulder at her.

Alex nodded. "Renee was talking about it a couple of months ago."

"You don't think its nuts?"

She frowned. "Not so much."

He put the album sleeve back in its slot and turned to her. "This life, I mean, it's dirty, and hard and even when Lucifer's gone, the demons, the monsters, everything else is still going to be around."

Shifting her position, Alex gave him a puzzled smile. "This is their life. It's all of our lives. It's the only life we've got. You think that no one should try and make the most of what they can and we let the species die out from lack of procreation?"

"No," he said, his brows drawing together a little defensively. "I – so it wouldn't bother you if your kids were raised as hunters?"

He didn't see her small flinch at his words, or the way her expression smoothed out afterward.

"If it meant they survived, I guess not," she said. "I mean … there're still other things to do here. Grow food, make things, work out how the stuff we used to take for granted all works – it's not like we're back to the Stone Age."

He leaned against the wall. She was right. It wasn't just a hunter's world. Or just a normal world. It was, at its most basic, a new world. One that didn't have the old rules, or at least not many of them.

"Right now," she continued slowly. "We're in survival mode. And we're on the offensive, I guess, against Lucifer, and the rest of them. That's a different thing again. That's what you've always faced, and yeah, I think most of the people here are worried about doing anything as permanent as having a family or making a commitment to another person in this situation. But whether we win or lose, that is going to change. And whatever happens next, people will adapt to it. They'll figure it out. And they'll find a way to keep going, to try and make things as comfortable as possible for themselves, to have families and do everything else they've done for thousands of years. It's how we got here."

She shut the book in front of her and stacked it together with the others on the bed, lifting them onto the nightstand.

He recognised the packing up action for what it was, a tacit request for him to leave and he walked to the door, turning back to her when he reached it.

"We're good, right?"

Alex nodded without looking at him. "Yeah, we're okay."

* * *

The cessation of the noise woke her, in the pre-dawn darkness three days later. It was eerie, she thought, sitting up and throwing the covers back, slipping out of the bed and getting dressed. The noise had become a constant and the silence seemed much louder.

She walked downstairs and opened the door, listening to the stillness outside, unable to see much. The outside lights had been coated with the insects, the glass protecting them an inch thick with the crackling black bodies.

There was a barely discernible lightening at the edge of the eastern horizon, and she shut the door, walking down to the kitchen and starting a pot of coffee. She'd have to wait for light to see what the outcome of the Fallen's visit was.

* * *

Dean woke abruptly, the silence ringing in his ears. He was off the sofa and across the room, his gun in his hand, before he realised that what had woken him hadn't been a noise but the quiet. Thumbing the safety back on, he slid the gun into his pocket and walked down past the kitchen to the back door, opening it silently and stepping out onto the porch.

No wind. No sound. No movement. A glance to the east told him it would be dawn soon. He could smell the powdery, dry scent of the insects, mashed against the boards they'd covered the windows with, thick over the exterior lights, lying in brittle drifts across the porch and steps, their carapaces empty and desiccated. Sweeping a clear space along the top step with his boot, he sat down on the edge of the porch and looked around carefully. There was no sense of the trees that lined the driveway from the gate down to the buildings, that grew tall in between the cabins and the lake shores. There wasn't the faintest breath of wind but even on still nights, he could usually hear the soft slurring of the pine needles, moving together under the weight of a bird or animal. Not tonight. Not now.

* * *

Alex put down her cup and walked out of the kitchen through the short hallway to the back room when she realised she could see the outline of her hands on the table. She opened the back door and registered the man sitting with his back to her, before her eyes took in the rest of the view beyond him.

The trees had gone. In between the house and the cabins and the lake shore there was nothing but earth, black and grey, churned up and turned over. There'd been grass growing around the church, down the path to the lake, along the verges wherever it had been able to get a hold. None of it remained, no leaf, or stalk or seed. She took a step toward the porch railing and remembered the gardens, turning and walking fast to the set of steps that led from the end of the deck down to the gently sloping ground at the rear of the house. She stopped at the top of the stairs.

The extensive truck garden, the rows of trees that had made up the orchard, the grassy fields past them … all gone. Dark earth lay humped and thrown up. The big deciduous trees that had shaded the fields were gone. The row of pines that provided a windbreak from the cutting northern winds … gone. The fence that had surrounded the vegetables was gone. She walked down the steps slowly, her feet automatically following the line across the dirt that had been the path to the garden gate. Crouching down, she stared at the two hinges and the latch that had been on the gate, the screws that had fastened them to the wooden pickets were lying next to them.

She could see Lookout Hill. She'd never been able to before, from here. The forest had been in the way, blocking the camp's view of all the other compounds. She could see them now.

"Is it as bad as I think it is?" Dean's voice came from behind her and she turned, her gaze going past him as she realised she could see right along the empty lake shore to the north.

"It's worse," she said bleakly. "No trees means no more buildings, unless we use stone, which will take a lot longer. No firewood for winter. No shade or shelter for the animals we have managed to save."

"Thought so," he said, looking around. They both turned as they heard a gasp from the porch. Alex saw Kim and Merrin, Carolyn and Dominique and Marcus standing there, some of the younger children close beside them. Carolyn looked down at them.

"We're going to starve here, aren't we?" she asked, her cheeks gleaming in the pale light.


	19. Chapter 19 In Tears and Silence

**Chapter 19 In Tears and Silence**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The hall was crowded and more people spilled out onto the porch, down the steps and along the gravel road. Dean looked around at the faces he could see, all of them filled with fear, bordering on panic. All of them looking for someone to tell them it would be alright.

He was damned if he could do that. Lie straight to their needful, hurting faces. He followed Alex onto the low stage at the end of the hall, his gaze moving over them, jaw aching with the tension of ignoring the thought that had been looping in his head since he'd first woken and seen the devastation that Baal had left. He'd done this to them. Done it to all of them, the people who'd been alive and were now dead, dust and ash or consumed or drowned or crushed.

"Everyone! Settle down," Boze called out to the room, and the murmur of conversation with its punctuations of shrill, barely contained hysteria, calmed and ceased as the people turned to look at him.

"No arguments, this is looking bad," Boze said slowly and clearly. He wasn't going to lie, that was the way it'd been in the old world. "But we're not in the fire yet, so we're not gonna panic and make things worse."

Alex looked around as she stepped up beside him. "We've all struggled to get here," she said, projecting her voice to the back of the hall, hoping the people outside could hear her as well. "And we all know how hard it was. But we're alive – everyone here – now because no one gave up or gave in."

The ripple of assent passed through hall. Under it, she could still hear the doubts. That was fair enough. There was plenty to be doubtful about.

"We've got seed put away, and we will replant every crop of oats and wheat, barley and corn; we can rebuild our gardens and plant new seedlings to replace the trees. That is a fact. That is something we can do," she paused to let that sink in. "We have enough food for every person here, enough to keep us going until harvest time."

"Not enough for full bellies!" a man shouted from the middle of the crowd. "We know it'll be rationed. How're we supposed to put in hard work on empty stomachs?"

"The same way you concentrated on keeping yourself alive every single day since the virus spread over the world," Renee said sharply, her gaze lasering in on the section of the crowd from which the comment had come. "You wouldn't be here if you couldn't do it."

"There are still stores of food in some places," Boze said. "We'll be sending out supply teams to get what we can, bring it back to eke out what we have and give us a better chance."

To one side, Dean watched the faces of the people in the hall, seeing their doubts about that. He had his own doubts about it, at least of getting anything in the kind of bulk they really needed.

"Those insects ate everything," a woman cried out from the back. "How do you even know if there's anything left?"

"Yeah! What if everything's gone –?"

"What if the soil is dead?"

"Or the wildlife is –?"

"We'll know what we can do when we get out there and do it," Dean cut in over the top of the rising babble, stepping forward, staring at them, his face hard and his voice, deep as thunder, filling the hall.

"Alright? We don't know for sure. But no one's gonna starve here, and we're not giving in to the fear that we're all feeling. We're going to fight with everything we've got because that's our only chance. Anyone who doesn't want to be a part of it, you're free to leave and see what you can do on your own."

The crowd was silent, looking up at him. The veiled threat had been clear enough, he thought, his gaze scanning the room.

"We've got a lot of work to do," Boze said after a moment. "Let's get on with it."

* * *

The shore seemed open and hostile when he walked down to it, nothing to hide him from the view of the buildings, from the eyes he felt on him. He heard the crunch of the gravel behind him and spun around.

Alex stopped a few feet from him, her expression sombre. "Thanks, they needed to hear it from you."

"Don't _thank_ me, Alex," he grated. "If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be here in the first place. None of these people would."

"That's –"

"You want to know who kick-started the whole thing? Me," he said, feeling the tension crawl up his spine and the back of his neck, feeling his blood pounding in his skull. "I didn't see it, thought I was doing the only thing I could do, making the deal, bringing Sam back. But I was wrong. They dangled that bait and I took it without even thinking about it, just signed myself up." He stopped and looked at her, his face twisting as he struggled with the emotions that memory brought.

"Demons are made through torturing the human soul until every last trace of their humanity is gone," he said, staring at her. "In Hell, time is different and it takes centuries to twist the soul, to make the demon …"

Later, he wouldn't be able to pinpoint the how or why his walls, the ones he'd spent so many years building, had cracked wide open, letting everything through in an overwhelming rush. It might've been that he'd had enough. Had enough of hiding. Had enough of pretending that it was all good, that he'd dealt, could deal. It could've been that with the end of the world all around them, he just couldn't take feeling it on his own anymore.

Memory poured into him, through him, flooding his mind with images and voices and a living darkness he'd spent the last three years desperately trying to bury.

He didn't hear himself talking, he was drowning in the past, in his past … _it's not a metaphor, there are agonies you can't imagine … every one, every single one turns into one of us … just say yes, Dean, you can end the suffering now … no? ah well, there's always tomorrow … and Daddy's little girl, he broke in thirty … when we win, we'll owe it all to you … the screams were coming from everywhere and he saw the razor wink in the directionless light and heard them coming from him … so help me, Sam, I got right off and I started carving them up … God … _

… help me.

* * *

Alex led him to the cabin closest to the lake's edge, pushing open the door and closing it behind them. He was still talking, half to himself, his gaze fixed and staring, looking at the things he'd tried to hide from, she thought as she pushed him to the bed. She knew how that went.

_Hell_, he was talking about, she slowly came to realise. Not an analogy or a kind of, but a place, a place that had held him tight. Years, decades, of being ripped apart and made anew and ripped apart again.

His voice rose and fell, the words coming faster and faster. His father and the sacrifice that had broken him in half. Sam's murder and his body lying in the house, limp and dead. The cold lips of a demon on his. Failure. Over and over again. Alastair and a razor blade that glittered in a light that wasn't light, in a place that didn't exist on earth.

She looked around the cabin for the bottle she knew would be there, somewhere, rising from beside him when she saw it on the bureau. His hand flashed out, gripping her wrist.

"Dean, I'm not leaving, okay?" she said softly and saw him come back to the present for a fleeting moment. He stared around the room in confusion.

_I did it, I did. Sam broke the last seal but I broke the first and I can never do enough to make up for that, no matter what I do, no matter how many people I save, I drank pain, submersed myself in it, felt it fill them and it felt good, it felt so good to see that it wasn't me feeling it …all that pain slipping away from him, but it'd come back, it'd come back when he was alone in the dark, the orgasmic pleasure turning to ash in his veins and shame flooding him, shame and disgust and a deep revulsion that ate through him …_

She sat beside him and listened as it spilled out, and after a while he couldn't talk any more, his throat sounded raw and filled with broken glass. He lay back on the bed, one hand fisted over his chest, as he struggled to breathe, the other gripped hers, tightly enough to crush her fingers. She didn't say anything to him, wasn't sure he'd hear anything. Every muscle she could see was contracted tight, iron-hard with tension.

"I don't remember how I got out," he said, looking down. "Cas was the one. He said he pulled me out on God's command."

He turned his head to her and she saw him again, seeing her. "I thought it meant something, thought it was a second chance. Thought that … it meant …"

* * *

Dean woke slowly, hearing the soft crackle of a fire, the sound of breathing close to him, feeling the heavy warmth of a blanket over him. He registered the pain in his head a moment later and grimaced, lifting his hand to his temple.

Cool fingers covered his and he opened his eyes, seeing Alex's face over him, outlined by the firelight from the small hearth. He was in his bed, in his cabin. He couldn't remember how he'd got there.

He let his hand fall as she pressed a cold pack against the side of his head, holding it there, the pain sliding away under the light pressure. His eyes widened a little as a few fragments of memory came back to him.

"What happened?" he croaked, swallowing painfully, his throat feeling lacerated and swollen.

She picked up his hand, lifting it to hold the compress in place and turned to the nightstand, taking a glass of water and giving it to him. He sipped the water, wincing as it slid down his throat.

"You know, confession, in the church, began when some priest way back when realised that people needed a way to tell someone about what they'd done, how it'd felt. Needed a safe place to do that, when they couldn't tell their families or their friends, so that they could find some way to forgive themselves and rid themselves of the guilt they carried," she said softly.

He looked at her warily. "No, didn't know that."

"I was talking to Father Michael about it. Psychologically speaking, people aren't really equipped to deal with a lot of guilt by themselves, there's no real way to bury pain. It needs to come out, and it does it subconsciously, in nightmares or in distorted behaviour, sometimes self-destructive behaviour, because our minds can't tolerate it," she continued quietly, lifting her gaze to meet his. "You can drink to dull it down, or take drugs, or keep trying to suppress it, but it's like an infection, it festers and poisons until finally, something snaps."

"Fascinating," he said, putting the glass back on the nightstand and trying to shift up the bed. He stopped when the pain in his head gave a huge throb, his eyes screwing shut against it.

"You nearly gave yourself a stroke, Dean," she said, her hand reaching for his shoulder, tightening over it.

More fragments of memory came back to him, behind the darkness of his closed eyelids and he sucked in a deep breath. He'd been talking. To her. About … everything, he thought, cringing inwardly as his memory threw up scattered moments of the conversation. No wonder his throat felt like it'd been chewed up and spat out.

"If confession is so fucking good for the soul," he whispered hoarsely. "Why don't I feel any better for it?"

He couldn't see her smile, but he heard it in her voice. "Getting it out is just the first step. You need to find a way to forgive yourself. This is not your fault."

"If I'd been stronger, none of this would be happening," he said, opening his eyes and looking at her. "If I'd died when I was supposed to, none of it would be happening."

"The only thing you did was try to stop the pain."

He wasn't going to think about that. "How long have I been out?"

"About eighteen hours," she said, seeing his face close up, the muscle jump at the point of his jaw.

_Eighteen hours_. Christ, everyone would think he'd bailed on them again.

"Goddammit, why'd you let me –" He cut himself off, ignoring the pain in his head as he forced himself upright.

"I didn't do anything to you," she said mildly. "You overloaded and passed out, Dean. Emmett and Maurice are handling things. They know where you are."

He pushed at the covers and she put her hand over his, stopping him. "Slow down, for a minute." She picked up a bottle from the nightstand and gave it to him.

Looking at the label, he opened the screw cap and tipped a couple of the pills into his hand, swallowing them and drinking a mouthful of water.

Alex got to her feet, glancing around the small room. "We got through to Bobby. Cas and Chuck should be here tomorrow."

Turning back, she looked at the bottle still in his hand. "Those will knock you out, no dreams. They'll take the pain. You should try and get more sleep."

She walked to the door and out of the bedroom, and a moment later he heard the front door close.

* * *

When he woke again, the pain had diminished to a dull sensation on one side of his head. Getting out the bed, he walked slowly to the bathroom, showering and getting dressed, doing everything by the numbers because his head felt as if it had been packed densely with cotton wool. A thin, silver light came through the windows, and he could see the lake, mirroring the brightening sky, the sun not yet above the horizon.

He walked out onto the narrow porch, sitting on the edge by the steps to pull on his boots. In every direction, the earth was dark and bare.

It was a dick thing to do, he told the entity he didn't quite believe in, but had had too much proof to discount entirely. Let everyone starve to death after everything they'd been through, because one man hadn't been strong enough. They don't deserve it.

"You want to make someone pay, then I'll pay," he said softly, feeling a vagrant air trickle across the skin of his neck. "I broke the fucking seal. Don't wipe everything out because I couldn't handle it."

The breeze stirred in the dirt in front of the cabin.

"Please." Dean looked up at the pearly sky. "Don't let them die for nothing. I'm asking for some help here. I can't do this alone."

The breeze sighed into stillness and he stood up.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Boze turned off the Twenty-three and onto the gravel road with a sigh of relief, the windshield wipers clearing the glass in front of him steadily. They'd been driving through the scorched and barren land for the last two days, the rain had started, little more than drizzle and had stayed with them across two states. He'd had a hard time keeping his imagination under lock and key through that time, wondering if the home he'd made for himself, the people he loved, were going to still be there when he got back.

Seeing the camp on the slope, the people moving around it, his mouth stretched into a wide grin and his foot pressed a little harder on the accelerator as he drove up the long incline to the gates. The air brakes squeaked and huffed when he stopped in front of them.

"Well, folks, we're here," he said, opening the doors and getting out of the driver's seat. "We've got some formalities to go through and then we can get you settled in somewhere with food and a bed."

He turned and stepped down through the open door onto the road, looking up at the guard on the wall. "Come on, you guys, let us in, lotta tired and scared people here."

The man who came up to the edge of the wall and looked down at him was unfamiliar. "Hands where I can see them, Boze."

He squinted into the soft rain, looking at the round bore of the gun barrel pointed at him.

"It's Phil, isn't it?" he guessed, the face behind the gun sparking a vague memory. The man nodded, gesturing to one side with the gun.

"That's right."

"Where's Vincent, Phil? Or Maurice?"

"They're … unavailable right at this minute, Boze. We had a … meeting and there's been a change of management, you might say." Phil shifted the gun in his hands.

"What the hell is that horseshit?" Boze looked up at him, brows drawing together as he wondered what the hell had gone on here. "Where's Renee?"

"She's fine, man, watch your blood pressure," Phil said. "But we're not taking new people here. We don't have enough food to look after our own. We're not going to starve."

Boze stared at him. "You asshole. We pulled you out of Boulder and you think this is your decision now?"

Phil smiled humourlessly. "You big hunters think you're the only ones who know how to shoot a gun? Look around. This camp, and Sable, we're running things here now. You think about it, Boze, you think about it hard. I got your lady in here, and you come up against us, who do you think is going to be the first one to get some ventilation."

"This isn't a fucking movie, Phil!" Boze shouted. "These people need food and shelter and that's our job!"

"Not any more," Phil said, shrugging. "If you're not going to be reasonable, you can just move along with them."

He moved the barrel and pulled the trigger, the crack of the rifle muffled in the misty, damp air, the bullet hitting the gravel and sending the small rocks flying at Boze's feet.

Rufus crouched behind the second last bus in the line, his binoculars held steady on the rear, watching the scene that was playing out unbelievably in them. He saw the man on the wall alter his aim, saw the spurt of dirt and rock at Boze's feet. Saw the big man turn away stiffly, getting back on the bus and the door closing.

_Sonofabitch_.

Lowering the glasses, he straightened up and got onto his own bus, starting the engine as the line began to move slowly away, following the gravel road down to the edge of the lake, and turning right to head back to the highway.

Boze turned left at the highway, his face hard and cold, his knuckles showing white under the skin as he struggled to control the rage that filled him. The long line of buses followed him as he made the turn off down to Chitaqua.

At the gate, Rona walked out as the buses filled the road, and he opened the doors, looking down at her.

"Just need the usual tests, Boze," she said, glancing into the crowded space. "Take it you went to Tawas first?"

"What the fuck, Rona?"

"Long story, we'll get your people in and settled first. I called down, shouldn't take long." She pulled out a bottle of holy water. "How many you bring in?"

"We're a little short of fifteen hundred," he said, taking the bottle of holy water she gave him, and gulping a mouthful, licking off the salt and rolling up his sleeve to lay the silver and iron knives on. Looking back over his shoulder, he called out to the line of people behind him.

"That's all that's needed, folks, just making sure we've got no uninvited guests with us."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Alex looked at Rufus, her expression drawn. "They took over Tawas the morning after Dean, Cas and Maggie left. We heard the gunfire, but by the time we got to the camp, it was shut up and they had enough hostages to make a firefight untenable. Sable was the same."

"Did they try here?" he asked her, jaw muscle jumping slightly.

"Yeah, pretty sure. A few people left the camp, no explanation, the night before, but we didn't miss them until the next morning. I would guess they went to one of the other camps and joined the action there." She looked around Bobby's office. "This place is small compared to the other camps, and most of the people have lived here longer, didn't think much of the idea, I guess. No one said anything, but a few people came forward the next day to say they'd been very discreetly sounded out on their opinions of the food rationing. They didn't think anything of it at the time."

"Everyone was scared, Rufus, when we saw what had happened," Kim said, looking from Rufus to Boze. "A lot of people didn't believe that we'd survive this."

"We may not've," Alex said dryly. "But we were planting when the rain started and it hasn't stopped since. You can hardly see it yet, but there's new growth coming up."

Boze looked bitterly at Rufus. "Kind of begs the question what the fuck we're doing risking our goddamned necks to save these people, doesn't it?"

"Gotta take the bad with the good," Rufus said distractedly. He looked at Alex. "Okay, what's the situation?"

"Emmett, Max, Matt and Felicia are definitely being held in Sable. Lake West and South Farms are okay, but Vincent was over at Tawas when they staged the coup and he, Renee, Maurice, Pastor Gideon and a few others are being held in Tawas," Alex said, looking at Father Michael who nodded.

"I went over to try to get them released, bring them back here – but Phil Madson isn't giving up the one thing he holds that guarantees that we won't attack the camp," he said.

"Well, he's wrong about that," Rufus said, flicking a glance at Boze. "We'll attack alright; they just won't see us coming."

Boze nodded. "How many we got who are useful?"

* * *

_**Ohio**_

The road gleamed black in the headlights, shining with the rain that the wipers was clearing with a steady, rhythmic beat. Dean was glad that the headlights didn't reach far off the road, he didn't need to look at any more of the devastation that they were travelling through.

The angel was slumped back in the seat beside him, head turned to the window. He couldn't tell if Cas was awake or sleeping. Stretched out along the back seat, Maggie was out, an occasional whistling breath reminding him that she was there.

The clouds had begun to gather the morning they'd left camp, filling the skies and releasing a constant, gentle drizzle over everything, washing the dirt and ash from the roads and the ruins of the buildings, soaking into the soil and darkening it.

He didn't know if it would be enough. He didn't know if it was an answer to what he'd asked for.

"_The only thing you did was try to stop the pain."_

He couldn't see it like that. His father had endured three times as long under the demon and he hadn't broken.

"_But he was made of something special."_

Maybe he had been. His son was not. His fingers tightened around the wheel.

Was it arrogance to wish he'd never been raised? Never been freed from the torment. Never had to find out that he wasn't the man he'd wanted to be, that his father had been? It was a stupid wish, he told himself savagely. Alastair would've told him sooner or later, the demon had just been waiting for the right time, the time it would do the maximum amount of damage.

He hadn't lied to him. There'd been a part of him that had been kept aside from what had been done to him and what he'd done. The part that dreamed. And he hadn't dreamed of revenge, when he'd dreamed in Hell. He'd dreamed of life. His life sometimes. Other lives. Dreams that had given their own protection. That had kept him sane.

They'd known exactly what he'd do. And the truth was, he'd been so angry at his father for leaving him, for giving up his life for him, leaving him anchorless, rudderless, powerless to stop Sam being dragged into Hell's grip, powerless to follow the last order he'd had, that he'd never even considered that there might've been another reason for it all.

"It wasn't your fault, Dean."

He started, glancing at the angel who was looking at him compassionately.

"Look around, Cas, there's no one else in the room."

"There were many involved in the freeing of Lucifer. Each had been given a part to play. Each had the freedom of will to stop at any point. None did. The blame does not rest on you," Cas said quietly. "I know what happened, Dean. When I lifted you from the pit, I saw everything."

Dean felt a shiver pass through him. "I was becoming … something else, Cas."

"The torture Alastair devised for you was complex, yet simple. He knew how you thought, Dean. He gained significantly more mileage from the way you tortured yourself over what you were doing, what you were feeling, than he ever did in what he did to you," the angel pointed out pragmatically. "You're still torturing yourself, Dean. Perhaps you should look at why you will not forgive yourself."

Dean was silent, staring through the windshield, thoughts churning in confusion.

"I know that you feel you failed your family, Dean," Cas continued quietly. "But your father resisted Alastair for all those years because he believed that he had failed – failed you and your brother, failed his wife, failed the reason he'd had for living. A part of him revelled in the torture, in the punishment he sought for his failures."

"You – you don't know that, Cas," Dean said, looking at him. "You can't know that."

The angel shrugged. "I know it. You couldn't have emulated that. You sacrificed yourself for Sam, yet you wanted to live. You didn't deserve what happened, and you knew it. It made it impossible to resist." He sighed deeply. "It was wrong of me, but I was glad when Sam killed Alastair, though it imperilled his soul to do it. The demon was far too good at his work."

* * *

_**Virginia**_

Jo sighed as Ty turned them around again, reversing away from the barricade of rusted vehicle hulks and going back the way they'd come. Even the small roads had been blocked, maybe when the croats were coming out of the big cities down the coast and hinterland, looking to find and trap any survivors. It was making the trip extremely slow, trying to find their way through the maze.

They'd found a house just before Baal had crossed their path, sealing and protecting it with the sigil of Gabriel, painting over the doors and windows and over their vehicles, huddling together in the basement with their limited stores until the third morning when the noise had stopped.

The desolation they'd been travelling through since had kept them all silent. Even when the rain had come, hiding much of it behind a silvery curtain, none of them had the heart to talk about the future, about meeting the legacies and bringing back the legendary weapon, saving the world. There wasn't enough left of the world to make that thought mean anything.

Dean'd been right about the croats, she thought, looking back at the map on her lap. They were gone, at least, so far as they'd been able to tell. Not a sign of any on the outskirts of the cities, not even as they got closer to the coast. They'd seen signs of ghouls, though. Graveyards disturbed, tombs smashed open. She wondered if they were human enough to have brought the wrath of Heaven down on them. When she'd been just a child, maybe nine or ten, she thought, her father had told her that nearly all the monsters he'd hunted had once been human. As if evil was somehow contagious, like a disease. He'd said that there were theories amongst a few of the hunters that vampirism and lycanthropy actually were diseases. He'd died before she'd been old enough to really understand what that had meant. What it implied.

"We'll try the county roads," she told Ty, as he straightened out the car and checked that Michael and Risa were still behind them. He nodded and put his foot down, following her directions to get off the highway at the next turning.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Ellen stood in the office they'd converted into a downstairs bedroom for Bobby, watching him take his weight on the crutches, fiercely suppressing her natural instincts to be beside him, ready to catch him if need be. He'd already growled at her once and she knew he wanted to be able to do this himself, to see if he was getting stronger, if the damage done was repairing itself.

For a moment, Bobby wobbled. Then he let his weight onto his foot tentatively. He could feel the sweat trickling in rivulets down the back of his neck, ignoring it, concentrating on his legs, how they felt, what they were telling him. He shifted his balance incrementally and relaxed his arms, his weight settling over his feet, the muscles of his legs aching, but remaining steady, holding him up.

Ellen put her hand over her mouth, trying to hold back her feelings as he lifted his head and looked at her.

"What now?" he asked her, red-faced with the exertion and tension, filled with a sudden, sharp yearning to throw the crutches down and walk over to her. He resisted the temptation.

"Take a step?" she suggested, her voice thick.

"I'll try," he said, looking down. The crutches felt awkward and in the way suddenly, and he lifted them off the floor slightly, hearing Ellen's indrawn breath as he lifted a foot and moved it forward. He didn't notice that the foot on the ground was holding his full weight, didn't notice that shift the other way as he set the lifted foot down and took another step. The ache in the muscles increased fast. He could feel them trembling and he put the ends of the crutches back on the floor, taking some weight off.

"I think we need to figure out how to get these damned legs of mine used to working again," he said, looking at her in surprise as he saw the tears streaming down her cheeks. "What?"

"Dammit, Bobby, you just took two steps, on your own," she said, walking to him, her hands reaching up to curl into the edges of his shirt as she kissed him. "Didn't you notice?"

He snorted, his neck reddening a little. "I was concentrating on how it was feelin'," he said sheepishly. "Not on what I was doin'."

"Well, hon, you were walking."

"You wanna break out the champagne or somethin'?" he asked her, trying for a mocking tone, but not quite making it, his excitement taking the sting out.

"Damned straight," she said. "You're right, we need to get those muscles warm and strong again before you try too much, or you'll end up on your ass."

She gestured to the bed beside him. "Sit down, I'll get the chair."

Bobby manoeuvred himself backwards to the edge of the bed and sat down, looking sourly at the chair when she wheeled it over to him.

"Really don't want to get back into that," he said, eyeing it mistrustfully.

"It won't be for much longer," she told him firmly. "Unless you overdo it like you always do and set yourself back."

"Damned bossy woman."

* * *

Jerome looked up as they came down the ramp into the situation room. "Just got a report from Peter and Maria," he said, waving a hand at the screen. "They've sighted Cape Hatteras, should be making Pamlico Sound by nightfall tomorrow."

"What about Dean, you heard from him and Cas?" Bobby asked him, looking at the bank of lit screens.

"No," Jerome admitted. "But that's not so surprising given that they must be close to Atlanta by now."

"And the camps?" Ellen asked him, leaning against the desk.

"Alex called in earlier. Rufus and Boze made it back from Austin, with just under fifteen hundred people. The situation at Tawas and Sable is the same, but Rufus and Boze are working on a way to get the camps back."

"Sons of bitches," Bobby said softly. "Bustin' our asses to get those people out of the devil's slave camps, then they mutiny."

"Well, apparently they haven't noticed that the hunters are skilled at getting in and out of impossible places, so let's hope it stays that way and they can retake them without the need for bloodshed," Jerome said.

"What are they going to do with those people?" Ellen asked, looking from Jerome to Bobby.

The two men looked at each other in silence.

"Can't go with exile," Bobby said slowly. Jerome nodded in agreement.

"Hard labour, possibly, if they're feeling charitable," he said. He doubted that the hunters would be feeling all that charitable by the time they got control again.

"Doesn't say much for our side, put them back in chains after rescuing them, does it?"

"They wouldn't need to if they'd behaved like people," Ellen snapped.

"Prospect of starvation does funny things to people, Ellen," Bobby said mildly. He didn't disagree with her assessment, but he knew that the people in the camps had been scared – hell, terrified – of what was happening, still happening in their shaken and upside-down world. And terrified people often did stupid things.

* * *

_**Atlanta, Georgia**_

He was standing on a hill, staring down at a city. It took a long time to recognise what he was looking at.

The sprawl of suburbs had gone. He could see the river clearly, the water tinged red against the blackened earth. The centre of the city remained, white and green, the line between the desolated countryside and the untouched buildings and trees as perfect as if it had been drawn with a compass. Everything on the outside of the circle had gone, and he lifted his head, seeing the scorched earth and drifting ash in every direction, as far as he could see.

_What have you done?_

"Oh, it wasn't me," Lucifer said, turning around and looking over the land to the north, to the east and west. "This is your beloved Heaven's work. My Father and big brother, cleaning house before the big showdown."

The angel smiled as he felt the soul next to him shudder.

"Michael and I, we're finally on the same page …mano a mano, toe to toe, I can feel Michael's itch for it," he continued softly. "And this … this is just a … sneak peek."

_No._

"Yes," Lucifer said. "If I win, and I will because I have you, and Michael only has his substitute boy instead of the vessel he needs, I will be extending the scorched earth policy right around this little rock. There won't be any regeneration."

Sam flinched at the sudden stab of the angel's anger, catching a confused kaleidoscope of images … rain and tears and tiny, green shoots emerging from the earth … a face that wasn't a face, old beyond imagining yet younger than his own … it was gone and Lucifer's fury remained, burning like a hot coal beside him, inside him.

"Of course, your prospects are not any better if Michael wins," the angel said. "Every living thing will be returned here … except one species."

_Why do you all hate us so much?_

He shrank back, hiding himself as the fury exploded, filling the vessel with heat and fire and tearing, shrieking noise.

_BECAUSE HE LOVED YOU MORE! HE LOVED YOU BEST!_

* * *

Dean pulled over at dusk, leaving the car off the road. There was no shelter, nothing to hide them, to let them come closer to the city shining in the gathering darkness. They would have to go in at night, and be back out before dawn. The medallion rested warm against the skin at the base of his throat, and his thoughts were clear and crystalline and cold.

They carried the most powerful hex bags they'd been able to make, but nothing would prevent them being seen if they walked into a group of demons. Hopefully, they wouldn't be recognised.

Cas got out of the car and stopped, turning around rapidly. "There is a gate here."

Maggie looked at Dean. "A hell gate?"

The angel nodded. "That's why he chose it."

"Wouldn't the good people of Atlanta have noticed a gate in their city?" Dean asked, looking around.

"It's been closed for a long time, before people came here," Cas said distractedly. "Even the deaths here weren't enough to open it before."

"What deaths?"

"Civil war, I guess," Maggie said, watching Castiel's expression. "How many deaths does it take to open a gate?"

"Not deaths, particularly, although that's usually the outcome. Blood," Cas said, gesturing to the south. "I should've realised that was why he chose Atlanta, why he was collecting people."

"To open a gate?"

"Michael will face him alone on a field of gold," Cas said slowly. "But he will bring the Host. Lucifer wants an army to meet them."

Dean looked at him disbelievingly. "So … what we'll have to deal with is icing a fallen angel, trapping Michael so he can't do anything, facing off two armies … anything else we need to know?"

"No," Cas said shortly. "That's it."

"Cas, do you know what's going to happen here? Isn't there a blueprint you guys have been following? No offence, but we don't need any more surprises," Maggie said to him.

He turned and looked at her. "I've been cut off from Heaven for two years, and everything that he has done has reformed the paths of destiny," the angel grated, gesturing at Dean. "So, no, we're so far off the map of what was supposed to happen, I don't know what will happen in the next five minutes, let alone what will happen when Michael faces Lucifer."

"Take it easy, Cas," Dean said.

"Take it easy?!" The angel spun around to face him, his eyes wide and filled with anger. "Lucifer's cage was unlocked. He was supposed to rise, and Michael was supposed to start breaking the seals leading to the battle of Armageddon. The cage was broken by the machinations of Heaven – but no one knows who's behind that, not at the highest levels. Lucifer is going to bring an army of demons to this plane, there will almost certainly be a Second War and all we have to stop this from happening is a small group of humans, most of whom don't even believe in God – take it easy, Dean?!"

"You done feeling sorry for yourself?" Dean asked him coolly.

The angel stared at him for a long time, before he dropped his gaze.

"Yes," Cas said, shoulders falling in defeat. "I'm … done."

"Then let's see what we can do about the devil." Dean turned away and started to walk down the road toward the city.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Phil leaned back in the big chair behind the desk in Boze's office and lifted the glass in his hand at the two men standing on the other side.

"See? This is what I'm talking about," he said, swallowing a mouthful of whiskey. "We got the good hooch, plenty of food just for our people, the control to make sure everyone plays along … you gotta take what you want in this world, amigos."

The taller of the two standing looked uncomfortably at him. "Phil, we got a whole bunch of women and children locked up, no one's going out and planting those fields or the gardens, and while this place is easy to defend against the black-eyes and the monsters, it ain't going to be so easy to defend ourselves against those hunters – they've been doing this commando shit a lot longer."

"Harris, you've missed the beauty of my plan," Phil said, straightening in the chair. "So long's we got hostages, not one of those meatheads will risk them. We're safe."

"I don't know that Harris isn't right, Phil," the other man said. "You know, if by some chance they do get the drop on us, they're not going to let us stay here."

"Jesus, you two are like fucking broken records," Phil snapped. "They're not going to get the drop on us, 'cos if they do we're going to start shooting their loved ones. End of story." He hunched back in the chair. "Go and check the perimeter or something useful, will ya? Bringing me down with all this shit talk."

The men looked at each other and shrugged, opening the door and going out. Phil looked at the deep amber liquid in his glass.

"Assholes," he muttered to himself. "This is going to be fine."

* * *

Alex walked up to the gate, conscious of the guns aimed at her, the items that were secreted in her clothes, the acting job she was going to have to pull off over the next half hour.

"Hold it," the guard called down from the wall, and she stopped, hands out and open.

"Is that you, Alice?" She looked up at the woman standing above her. "It's Alex, I just want to see Ben and Renee."

"A casual visit?" Naona looked down at her from the other side. "Really?"

She shrugged. "I've been up here a dozen times, Naona, and it's always for the same reason. I want to make sure my friends are alright."

The tall, dark-haired woman lifted the barrel of the rifle and the gate began to open. Alex waited until the gap was wide and walked in.

"Lucky it's us girls on duty now," Naona said with a smile as she climbed down. Alex looked at her, lifting her hands to shoulder height and shifting her feet apart. The search took five minutes, and neither woman was particularly thorough, perhaps a result of inexperience, perhaps embarrassment, she wasn't sure which. The men tended to be more thorough but she had the feeling that had nothing to do with searching for weapons.

"Alright, see Tony, he's looking after the prisoners," Naona said coolly, straightening up.

"Prisoners now?" Alex asked, looking from her to Alice. "What is wrong with you?"

"You want to see them or do you want to turn around and walk straight back out?" Naona said to her in a low voice. "Because I don't need this shit."

Alex looked at Alice, seeing the young woman's uncertainty. Alice dropped her gaze after a moment.

"No, I want to see them."

"Then get going."

Walking up the curving road to the main building, Alex wondered what they would do with these people when the hunters retook the place. They couldn't just send them out. The lesson of what happened with Jake had been well-learned and even after being here a short time, they knew the layouts and locations of the camps, knew the leaders. They didn't have the time, people or food to keep them here either. And there was no way to trust them now, even the ones who might be rethinking the whole thing. A turncoat could find a better deal anytime, her father had used to say.

* * *

Tony was eighteen, she remembered as she came down the narrow basement stairs and saw him. Tall and skinny, with greasy blond hair that flopped over his forehead and not much of a sense of personal hygiene, he'd told her he was a mechanic when he'd come in from Boulder. Vincent had told her a week later that he'd lied about that, not knowing one end of an engine from the other.

"Alex," he said as she walked along the hall to him, his eyes moving down her, lingering on the swell of her breasts under the shirt she wore. The last time she'd been here, there'd been another man with him. This time he was alone. "You carrying any contraband for these people?"

She looked at him dryly. "No. Same as last time. Alice and Naona already checked."

"Those skanks never do a good job," he said, lips twisting up in a sneer, stepping close to her and gesturing with the gun to lift her hands.

Alex lifted her arms away from her body, feeling for the steel rod in the seam of her shirt sleeve with her fingers. If he put the gun down, she'd be close enough. One push, Rufus had told her, through an artery.

He stood behind her and she closed her eyes as she heard the clunk and scrape of the gun's stock against the concrete floor. His hands slid up under her arms, reaching around to her breasts and she turned abruptly, the rod driving, almost without resistance, into the side of his neck, and punching out the other side, bright red blood pumping out with the beat of his heart over her fingers and down his chest.

Staring at her, his hands began to flutter at the object stuck in him, and she backed away, her gaze dropping to the gun. She stepped around him and grabbed it, checking the safety was off and a round was loaded, holding the end on him until he dropped to his knees. Big artery, close to the heart, she thought to herself, nodding a little at the explanation of how simple, relatively speaking, it'd been. That was two people she'd killed.

She shut the thought out and moved closer to him as he toppled sideways onto the floor, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. The key ring was on his belt, held on with a clunky dog-leash clip and she unclipped it, and turned away, thumbing the safety back on the gun and tucking it under her arm as she searched through the keys for the right one.

In the distance, there were a number of pops, and she looked up, recognising the sound of gunfire. Single shot, drawing attention only. She still had two minutes. She found the key and slid it into the lock, turning it hard and pulling open the door.

There was another guard inside. That was new.

Harris' head snapped up as he saw her framed in the doorway, his eyes widening as the barrel of the gun she held rose, her thumb finding the safety, all before she'd registered what she doing. The shot was deafening in the small room and he fell off the chair to the floor, eyes still wide, a small, round black hole between them.

"Alex!" Renee crossed the room in a few strides, glancing down at the man and back to her.

She looked up at the taller woman and nodded. "Boze and Rufus are outside, making some noise. We need to get the kids hidden, down in the tunnel, I think?"

It'd been Liev's idea, a passageway from the main building under the foundations to the grain barn that lay near the wall. It was well-hidden and its existence wasn't common knowledge.

Renee turned and looked at the people behind her. Patricia, Chuck, Debbie, Tim and a dozen children, Renee's and Debbie's included, stood there. Tim moved straight up to Alex, taking the gun from Harris' open hand and looking at his wife, Maurice and Vincent coming up beside him.

"Deb, take the kids down to the tunnel. You and Pat need to stay there, until we come get you, lock yourselves in."

She nodded and led them out past the bodies and deeper into the basement's warren of rooms.

"What's the plan?" he asked, looking at Alex.

"I'm supposed to signal once you're safe, and they'll come in," she said, glancing at Renee. "Blanket out of the top floor window."

"Chuck, go with Alex and do that," Tim said. "Renee, go with the kids. Maurice, Vincent and me'll get us some more guns and start taking them out from in here."

They nodded and split up, turning in opposite directions at the foot of the basement stairs, the hunters heading upstairs and Chuck and Alex hurrying along the hall to the back staircase.

"Harris wasn't that bad a guy," Chuck said as they started to climb.

"I know." Alex glanced back over her shoulder at him. "How many people in here who are actively working with Phil?"

"About a hundred," Chuck said reluctantly, seeing what she was saying. "They're going to kill them all?"

"I don't know, Chuck," she replied, lifting her gun and dropping to her knees as she peered out into the open second storey hallway.

* * *

_**Swan's Reach, North Carolina**_

Jo rubbed her eyes tiredly. The river and shoreline were thick with fog and her eyes were playing tricks on her, showing her shapes in the amorphous grey mass that weren't there, hiding the things that were.

"We're sure this is the right place?" she asked Ty for the third time. He looked at her, smiling.

"Sure."

"Then where are they?"

"Fog isn't moving, guess they might've run out of wind – or dropped the pick, not being able to see," he suggested mildly. Her impatience was one of the things he liked about her.

Looking in the rear view mirror, he could see the car behind still bouncing slightly on its springs. Michael and Risa had found a way to pass the time. He snuck a sideways look at Jo, his gaze following her profile down the long curve of her throat. She'd been subdued for most of the drive. Not distracted, still on top of things, but not talking much and not looking happy to be on what had to be one of the most important jobs they'd been given.

He'd seen her hang back to talk to Winchester, after the briefing. He wondered what had passed between them. Nothing that Jo had liked, he'd figured. She'd get over it, if the guy'd made it plain that it was never going to happen. He didn't want to ask. He didn't want to be the rebound guy and he didn't want to be her counsellor. He wanted a partnership.

His parents had both been hunters, experienced, cold-eyed people who'd lavished love on him and his little sister whenever they were home, and had had a relationship that still struck him as being perfect, equal partners who respected and loved each other, knowing each other's flaws and strengths and having each other's backs every time. He didn't know if they'd made it through the virus. They'd been on a hunt in northern Canada when the world had blown to hell.

That was the relationship he wanted with the woman sitting next to him, and the only way he'd get it was if he played it cool and let her figure it out for herself. She had to want it that way as much as he did, or it would never be equal, never be right between them. He'd waited more than a year, he could wait a bit longer.

She yawned and he hid a smile. "Get some sleep."

"No, I'm good," she replied automatically.

"Jo, no one, least of all me, is going to think any less of you for getting rest when we can afford the time for it."

She glanced at him, jaw muscle flexing as she repressed another yawn. "You sure?"

"Yeah," he shifted over closer to the door and she lay along the bench seat. Now he could see why Winchester liked the big, gas-guzzling muscle cars, he thought, as she settled her head on his thigh beside the wheel.

* * *

"Jo, they're here," Ty said quietly, looking down at her. She opened her eyes and sat up, seeing the ghostly shape of a tall mast moving slowly up the river, hearing the low chug of a diesel engine muffled by the fog.

"Let's go," she said, zipping up her jacket and opening the car door.

Ty got out the other side, looking back to the car behind and nodding to Michael, who was watching.

The engine note changed after a few moments and they saw the mast slow and stop, heard the slap of rope hitting the dock, as the boat reversed to stop its forward speed.

Jo stepped onto the concrete pier and froze as the man on the bows finished tying the line onto the cleat and turned fast, the gun in his hand pointed at her.

"You're Jerome's hunters?" he said, his voice deep, with an accent she couldn't place. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair receding from a high, aesthetic forehead, his eyes a clear, deep blue, slightly hooded.

She nodded, and took a step forward, Ty beside her, Michael and Risa following them.

"Jo Harvelle," she said. "This is Ty McClure, Michael Santorini and Risa Baum."

"Peter Andante," he said, straightening up and letting the barrel of the automatic drop. Ty noticed he didn't put the safety back on, or holster it. "Didn't expect the fog. Are we safe enough to stay moored to the dock?"

Jo nodded. "The croats were all killed when the sixth seal was broken. We haven't seen much else around here."

"I'll be coming with you," Peter said, the full-lipped mobile mouth lifting wryly at one corner. "Maria will go back."

"That's not what we were told," Ty said warily.

Peter shrugged. "Jerome asked. He said you needed all the help you could get, and I'm experienced."

"Experienced how, exactly?" Jo asked him.

"Experienced with angels and demons," Peter said lightly. "I used to work for the Church."

* * *

_**Atlanta, Georgia**_

Dean crouched in the deep shadows beneath the line of trees that lined the grand sweep of lawn, watching the movement of the man through the lit and uncovered long windows of the huge house.

With the medallion, he thought, he could get in there, unseen. Confront the devil … _And then what?_ The more prosaic part of his mind asked acidly. _Defeat him with your charming smile? Harsh language?_ His mouth twisted a little as he let out his breath. That would be about the extent of it. Lucifer might laugh himself to death.

"Not thinking of going in there, are you?"

He jumped a little at the angel's voice beside him. "No."

"Good," Cas whispered. "Ripping you apart in front of your brother would make Lucifer's day but that's all it would achieve."

"Where's Maggie?"

"Heading back to the car," Cas told him, looking under the foliage at the house. "The hall matches Alex's description."

Dean nodded. "We should put the trap in there."

"Between the medallion and the Spear, you will be able to get right in, on your own," Cas said. "But we'll need another trap, one for Michael."

"The prophecy says they meet on a field of gold," Dean remembered. "You see anything like that?"

"Yes." Cas began to inch backward through the vegetation. "We can discuss it when we're not on the devil's doorstep."

Dean waited for him to clear the narrow gap in the shrubs that he'd wriggled in through, and backed out. They'd found the gate. Cas thought the ritual to open it would take place on the next dark phase of the moon, in three weeks' time. Which meant they had to be there, and ready. The bombs would take care of most of the demons already in the city, along with the more usual weapons.

The city drew its water from the river and several other sources, making it impossible to bless and use. Maggie had already suggested using the fire brigade's tanker trucks, to disorient and confuse the opposition while the more skilled combatants went in under their cover. It would work, he thought carefully, climbing the stone wall that surrounded the mansion's grounds and dropping to the ground beside Castiel.

They kept to the shadows of the buildings, walking confidently when they had to cross under the streetlights and entering the sewer system in what remained of an old and rundown section, following the pipes to the now non-existent suburbs, behind the low hills. Maggie waited by the car, a dark figure against its sleek black lines, both of them almost invisible against the black earth behind them.

The rain that had been falling gently for a week had soaked them through by the time they reached the vehicle. It didn't fall inside Lucifer's protections and wards, but the countryside outside that demarcation line was becoming saturated.

Getting in, Dean sat silently behind the wheel for a long moment, his fingers resting on the key, thinking through what they'd seen over the last four days. He turned in the seat, looking at Cas and Maggie.

"Do we need to see anything else?"

"I don't think so," Maggie said. "The stadium is near the centre of what he protected, and the slaves have all been quartered close to the gate."

He nodded. "We'll need two fronts, one to take each."

"How many to handle Lucifer, and Michael?" Cas looked at him.

"As few as we can get away with," Dean said. "And no one confronts either of them. The traps get laid and I'll play bait to lead them in."

Castiel sighed softly and Dean shot a look at him then decided to ignore it. "Rufus, you and me to handle Lucifer in the house," he said shortly. "Emmett, Max and Vincent to lay Michael's and get the hell out of there. Or if we need to, we can handle Michael before we get to the big house."

He shook his head slightly. At this stage there were too many variables to commit to anything.

"And we miss them?" Cas asked.

"Then we go through the same routine at the field. We'll need to get the timing just right, but Franklin and Mel should be able to handle that."

"You're not leaving much margin for error, Dean."

"There is no room for error, Cas," Dean snapped. "We get one shot at this. For now and forever. If we fuck it up, we'd better hope we're all killed here."

Cas was silent. In the back seat, Maggie looked from the angel's tense face to Dean's. They had a few advantages, surprise being the most potent, she thought. That and the resolution carved into the face of the man sitting in front of her. It wouldn't be easy, this task he'd set himself, set for all of them. But there was no doubt in her mind that it was doable.

* * *

He'd taken the medallion off at the angel's insistence, feeling the two days of driving crash down on him, hunger and thirst and all the annoying considerations he'd been able to ignore hitting him at the same time. Maggie had taken over the driving and he'd slept for a few hours, waking as she pulled in to an old farm, its storm cellar still intact and defensible.

They were taking watches and he sat by the door, feeling slightly more human after the sleep and food, while the angel who was closer to a man and the acerbic hunter slept in the iron cots at the other end of the shelter. He'd wake Maggie in four hours and get another four or so hours of sleep, he thought. It'd be enough to see them into Kentucky.

His rambling discourse to Alex had come back to him over the last six days, in pieces, in flashes of memory. Those pieces, those vivid images, hearing himself tell her, felt like his skin had been flayed off, leaving him without any protection at all, the worst pain, the deepest shame, his despair and rage and helplessness, all exposed.

It made no difference, he found, that he didn't think she would ever use anything that he'd told her against him. Made no difference that he was sure she would never tell anyone else what he'd said. Made no difference that amongst those memories, were others, her arms around him, her voice soothing and low, a sense of comfort in the middle of anguish. She knew. All of it. And that thought writhed and twisted inside of him, unbearable, agonising, unendurable.

He'd tried so hard to keep her out of it, to keep someone who looked at him without knowing his history, his past, someone who just saw him as he was. _Like Lisa?_ The thought intruded painfully. _You wanted someone who didn't know anything about you, like Lisa didn't, and didn't want to? Someone you couldn't talk to, who wouldn't understand? Someone you lied to, maybe? Someone you were never yourself with?_

The thoughts were dominoing faster and he shook his head impatiently. He'd wanted someone to look at him the way she had that dawn, and that voice in his mind gave a derisive snort. _Not likely now, is it?_

It wasn't, he knew. Sam had looked at him differently after he'd told him. Had thought, had told him, that he was broken. Like Famine. Like Lucifer.

He was. He knew it. He didn't know how to find all the pieces and put them back together. Wasn't even sure that he wanted to. Too much had happened. Too much had changed to go back.

What did that leave? _Kill Lucifer_. Maybe having to kill his brother at the same time. Maybe dying in the attempt. He didn't know. If he did somehow make it through, what then?

_Make it out alive before you start worrying about what happens after_, he told himself bitterly.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Alex sat in the corner between the two thick walls, barely hearing the fusillade of gunfire that echoed around the buildings, her attention focussed on the man leaning against her, held in her arms.

"Just hold on, Father, Renee and Dr Morris will be here soon, they'll fix it, you'll be okay," she said softly to him, smoothing back the silver-threaded hair from his forehead, her fear and her grief locked tightly up inside. He looked up at her wryly, eyes crinkling up at the lie.

"Alex," Father Michael said, coughing as the liquid gurgled up his throat. "The only thing I ever wanted … was to see… God's work," he told her, the words coming out slowly. His hands were pressed over the holes in his abdomen, slick with blood that kept pumping out of him. "To know that He was still with us."

"You have more work to do, Father," she said, looking down at him. "We need you."

"No, you don't." He closed his eyes. "I wanted … to … see a … miracle."

"Father, don't –"

"Look …"

She followed the jerky movement of his head. In the earth beside the road, she saw what he was looking at, the push of a seedling through the wet soil, growing taller and unfurling its leaves as they watched it, others rising up beside it.

"God isn't … dead," Father Michael said breathlessly. "And … have … seen …"

"Don't," she said to him, her arm curling more tightly around him, her hand pressing harder over his as her tears rose. "Don't you leave."

He didn't answer and she looked at his face, the muscles soft and slack, his eyelids half-closed. The blood that had been trickling steadily from the corner of his mouth was slowing down.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Bobby held onto the rail and gripped the stick, easing himself down the broad, shallow flight of steps from the library to the situation room. He was stronger, he could feel the muscles gaining strength every day, the exercises painful but the pain welcomed now.

He walked slowly to the desk, sitting down in the chair beside Jerome and reading the message on the screen. Tawas and Sable had been recaptured. Twenty of the people who'd taken the camps over had been killed. The rest, almost two hundred of them, were being held in the hall. Terry had been killed. And Father Michael, both caught in the cross-fire.

Sighing deeply, he pushed his cap back and closed his eyes. Jerome looked at him.

"Emmett still has that boat, doesn't he?"

* * *

The library was shadowy, the overhead lights off and just the glass-covered desk lamps illuminating a few tables. Jerome looked up, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he heard footsteps down the hall.

"Anything else I can do for you, Professor?" Aaron asked as he came through the doorway.

"No, thank you, Aaron," Jerome said. "Goodnight."

"'Night, sir." He disappeared, his footsteps receding down the hall.

Looking back down at the manuscript in front of him, Jerome wondered if he was wasting his time. There was no reference to the Spear in prophecy or legend or myth confirming it would kill Lucifer, yet he was certain that this was the answer. Lucifer had disobeyed, had rebelled against Heaven and God and had attempted to create a new kingdom of his own. He was no creator though, he thought sourly. Hell had been carved into a dark mimicry. And Lucifer had taken all that was good and destroyed it.

He pushed the script aside, and leaned his head against his hand, thinking of the dreams that had connected Alex to Sam Winchester. She'd said she had no memory of doing anything to cross over and yet she had, gone physically to the place that had drawn her to it. Was it Lucifer who'd unknowingly brought her? Or Sam? Or something else?

In the back of his mind, a memory tingled. A voice, a word … but nothing more. He frowned at that faint whisper, filled with the sudden conviction that he would know how she'd done it and why if he could just get that memory closer. The tingle vanished and he let it go. Perhaps it wasn't important any longer. Sam had gotten the information to his brother and they had the weapon and the way to use it. It might have been his scholar's sensibilities that kept him hunting the elusive answers.

As he was hunting other answers, he considered, exhaling and forcing himself upright. He'd searched for any other reference to the prophet's stone, beginning with what the library had in the same time period and extending before and after. It nagged at him, that stone, with its extremely efficient means of destroying demons. Who had written it? And why? And where had it disappeared after the prophet had died? Why had no one written anything about it since then?

He had the feeling that it was a key, something that might even have been the reason for the formation of the order, something that would make sense of all other things. But if it had been, or if it was, there were no records of it here and the other chapters hadn't found any more than he had.

Singer would be going back to the camps, he knew. He wouldn't be able to sit in the library once he could walk again. He would miss him, and Ellen, their sharp minds and abrasive wit. He thought Aaron would stay, as addicted to the search for answers as he was. And Frances, possibly Marla. Oliver was interested more in the apothecary lore than the reference works, but they could use a specialist. The others, Taylor, Danielle and Ted would probably go back to the camps, none of them really interested in chasing down leads and clues through the labyrinthine words of the past.

Rufus and Boze had brought in another fifteen hundred from Austin. And Emmett and Max had saved almost a thousand. There might be more suitable candidates in those. If they didn't volunteer for Dean's army, march on Atlanta and get themselves killed.

He glanced at the clock and pushed his glasses higher up his nose, drawing the manuscript close to him again.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The black car pulled up in front of the big house and Dean switched off the engine, leaning back tiredly. He'd taken off the medallion as they come through the town and exhaustion was eating at his bones, two days' straight drive from Kentucky to Michigan was at least a day too long these days.

He heard the clunks of the passenger and rear doors shutting and sat up, opening his door and getting out. The ground was no longer black, it was misted with pale green as everything, apparently, grew again. It should've given him some hope, or at least a bit of a lift, but he was too tired to feel hopeful about anything.

Looking over at the church as he turned for the house, he saw a familiar figure, kneeling on the ground beside the small building. He stopped, wondering what she was doing.

"Lost Father Michael," Rufus said from beside him.

"What?"

"Long story." The older hunter looked him up and down. "You look like five kinds of hell."

"Thanks," Dean muttered, turning to look back at Alex. "He's buried there?"

"She asked."

He followed Rufus up the steps, feeling a deep relief as he passed across the porch and through the door. In a lifetime of few homes, he'd been here the longest of any of them, and he felt some of the weight drop off when he walked in.

* * *

He walked down to the cabin after midnight, going inside and stripping off his clothes, leaving them in a pile on the floor as he walked into the bathroom, still reeling a little from the accounts of what had happened while they'd been gone.

_People_, he thought, the word laced with bitterness.

Emmett, Boze and Rufus had loaded the malcontents onto the small steel cargo ship that Emmett had arrived in, and taken them to Swan's Nest Island, thirty miles into the lake up north, a long, narrow island that was also regenerating, albeit slowly. The lake hadn't died that far north, and the people had been left with fishing gear and a small amount of food. Whether or not they survived was up to them.

It wasn't an ideal solution, he thought, turning off the taps and grabbing a towel. But it was the only one they'd had. When the rest was over, he thought he'd send someone up there to check on them. From the hunter's accounts, a lot of the people had more or less just gone along with the plan, afraid mostly, and not thinking in their fear.

As for the rest, everyone was out now, every daylit minute of the day, planting, weeding, tending the gardens. The rain still fell gently and things were growing, fast enough to watch them. Father Michael had called it his miracle, Rufus said, recounting Alex's words about the priest's death. Seeing God's hand finally. Dean wasn't so sure, but Ben had told him about a grove of oaks that begun to grow where they'd been before, edging the Tawas truck garden. They'd started six days ago and were now taller than him.

No progress could be made on a new camp, and the buildings of every camp were full, people sleeping wherever they could, under whatever Alex and Renee, Patricia and Merrin had been able to find for them. The farmhouses they'd scavenged from over the past year were gone. Everything that hadn't been protected was gone. They would be spinning and weaving their own blankets from now on, Renee had said. And clothing.

There'd been no word from Jo and Ty since they'd left the coast. Jerome had called to let them know that they'd met with the legacies; the chick from the island had called in to confirm that they'd left the coast with the Spear. There was no real possibility for radio contact with them anyway.

He tossed the towel over a chair and fell onto the bed gratefully, swallowing Merrin's no-dream pills. He needed eight hours solid.

* * *

_**Pennsylvania**_

"Any more brilliant ideas?" Jo asked Peter sourly, wiping at the blood that dripped down her forehead and onto her eyelashes.

"I don't understand, that should've worked," the hunter said, staring at the fizzing bottle in the centre of the clearing.

"Plainly, something went wrong," Jo snapped. "Give me the Spear."

"You can't use it," he warned her. "Not the tip."

"Not gonna use the tip," she said, taking it from him and unwrapping the end of the long haft.

"Jo – don't do anything stupid," Ty said, lying beside her. The bandage wrapped around his chest was soaked through and his words came out in little spurts as he struggled to breathe steadily.

"Hey, it's me," she said, straightening up and jumping over the makeshift barricade.

In the clearing, eight demon-possessed men looked at her, spreading out and grinning as they saw she was coming alone.

"Just a skinny little girl here," she said, her eyes bright and her skin flushed. "Come and get me."

The first ran in and Jo dropped to one knee, swinging the long, cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands as he raised his gun. She flinched at the gun's retort, but nothing hit her and the very end of the Spear touched the man's leg.

He turned instantly to ash, holding his form for a micro-second in mid-stride then collapsing into a pile on the ground.

"That's more like it," she muttered to herself, getting to her feet and advancing on the nearest demon.


	20. Chapter 20 End of Days

**Chapter 20 End of Days**

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

There was grass again. And the seedlings had grown to saplings, in the space of weeks instead of years. Dean looked around as he and Rufus walked down the drive to the lake. On the flat meadow behind the cabins, the cows and sheep and goats were grazing. Behind the big house, the vegetable garden was flourishing. The fruit trees were a little under five feet tall, and some of them, at least, had produced a few flowers. God's work, Pastor Gideon had told him. The man had been smugly contented, and why not? His little church over in Sable was full for every service and hell, every person in the camps probably believed in God now, Dean thought with a slightly derisory smirk.

"Morning, Rufus."

Dean looked back at the road, seeing a man in his mid-fifties, dark hair greying at the sides. He was wearing an odd assortment of clothing, in different sizes and patterns, but that wasn't unusual, most people were wearing whatever the camps could find for them. Light grey eyes crinkled in a friendly fashion as he came closer.

"Clarence, what brings you to Chitaqua?" Rufus slowed down, glancing at the notebook in the man's hands.

"Max asked me to come over," he said, gesturing around vaguely. "Talk to Alex, get a definitive livestock count for trading with South Farms." He shrugged and grinned. "It's a nice day for walking around."

Rufus laughed. "Got that right, good luck with it."

"Thanks, you have a good one," Clarence said, nodding politely to Dean as he kept walking.

"Who was that?" Dean asked Rufus.

"Clarence … uh … Dalby, I think," Rufus said, frowning. "Came in with us from Austin. Probably one of the few not completely panic-stricken, and he helped out with keeping the others calm."

"Useful," Dean remarked.

"Yeah," Rufus said. "So, when do we have the pow-wow about Atlanta, Dean?"

"When Jo and Ty get back with the Spear," Dean said, turning for the house. "Gonna be a real short offensive without it."

"How do we work the people? Conscription?"

Dean shook his head. "No, volunteers only. Cas told us that Lucifer is trying to open a gate – get himself an army to counter the Host. I only want people who know what they're facing, know what they're getting into down there."

"We might not get that many," Rufus said with a bitter grimace. How many would readily stick their necks out for this fight?

Dean stopped walking and turned to face him. "Then that's what we get. I'm done with lying about our chances, Rufus."

The older hunter nodded slowly.

* * *

Kneeling in the warm, black earth, the sun warm on her back, the pile of weeds growing beside her, Alex felt a deep contentment. Everything was growing at an accelerated rate. They would be able to put aside a lot of food for the winter if it kept up like that. It wasn't all that noticeable with the grasses and the vegetables and crops which grew fast in good conditions anyway, but it was a daily astonishment to watch the trees grow, more branches appearing overnight, gaining height and width every day. She wondered what the rings looked like, but there was no way any one was cutting one down, not yet, anyway.

The camps were overcrowded and Liev, Dean and Boze had been working on separating out a part of the town, where the natural boundaries of river and lake could help, into a new camp. The builder and his team had painted every house in East Tawas with the mark of Gabriel, and he'd told her that the houses that were indefensible could be demolished, the timbers reused for more housing in the areas that could be protected. It was a flat section and they were using a lot of stone, quarried from the pit along the airport road, to build the outer walls.

It would still be crowded, she thought vaguely, clearing another section of the tomato bed of weeds which were growing with the same mad enthusiasm as the plants they wanted, distantly aware of the noises of the children up and down the garden, picking up her piles in the wheelbarrows and carrying them away to the compost heaps. But nowhere near as bad as it was now.

With Detroit and the other major cities cleared of croats, it would be easier to get the tools they needed, at least. Emmett and Max had taken a small scouting team to Detroit a week ago. When they'd returned, they'd said everything not made of metal or stone had been devoured. Dave had put in crops of flax and hemp and cotton, moving further out through the farms to ensure that their supplies of food would be sufficient, in addition to the non-edible crops and pastures. There was enough land, and enough labour, he'd told her. It was a matter of sufficient protection for those working on those places. There weren't nearly enough hunters who knew what they were doing, what the signs might be, to be able to spread out too much.

And then there was Atlanta.

She tried not to think about it. Tried not to imagine what it would be like. They were waiting for Jo to return with the Spear, Dean had said. Then they would be going. And no one here would know if they'd succeeded or failed until the army came back … or didn't.

It seemed strange to think of it as war, although she supposed that's what it was. The only things she knew of war were the stories her grandmother had told her, on the infrequent summer holidays she'd had to spend with her in Virginia, stories of the Second World War, of deprivation and hardship in a small village in England, and men going off to Europe by the boatload, many coming back with terrible injuries, broken and scarred inside and out, many not returning at all. There had been pride in those stories, keeping one's courage no matter what happened. There had been despair in them as well. And a deep sadness her grandmother had never explained to her.

They had not been the happiest of holidays. Her grandmother had lost her husband and her daughter and even as a child, Alex had been able to see the bitterness in her, at those losses. She lived alone and in her memories most of the time, and the stories of war and a far-away green country with odd money and quaint customs had been the strongest memories. She hadn't had the heart for a grand-daughter, Alex had felt.

She finished the bed and got to her feet, brushing the soil from her jeans and looking around. The tomatoes and peas, beans, leeks, onions and carrots, broccoli and cauliflower and beets and potatoes, peppers, zucchini, pumpkin, swedes, spinach, and parsnips and celery and lettuces were all coming along fast. The children kept the insects off them and weeded daily and by the time the army came back, she thought, they would be harvesting. Even now they could pick the early tender leaves, welcome additions to meals that had been primarily stews and roasts, made up from the remaining stores of their harvest last year.

Turning down the path, she left the garden and walked down the smooth, grassy slope to the lake shore, finding a place to sit near the water's edge. What he'd told her, in an almost incoherent outpouring of pain and shame and guilt, had been hard to go through, to make sense of. She'd questioned Bobby and Jerome on the history and that had given her a framework to fit his memories into, at least.

The picture of his life, of the things that had shaped him, was not complete. She thought of her early impressions of him, the overwhelming sense of protectiveness, of responsibility. That had been explained, at least in part. What was nature and what had been nurture would never be fully understood, she knew. No one could make those distinctions accurately, even for themselves. The systematic destruction of every single thing he'd needed … that bothered her. She didn't believe in coincidence. Not any more. Coincidence was merely a term coined by minds unable to grasp visions of magnitude. Family. Friends. Loyalty. Trust. Love. All of them had been removed, in one way or another, and many over the critical period leading up to what he'd thought of as his worst mistake. That wasn't coincidence. He was right about that.

When he'd been talking about it, her imagination had provided the images. They'd remained with her, vivid and frightening. She didn't understand how he could blame himself for what had happened. Even for what he'd done and felt about it, given that she thought he knew he'd been pushed into everything he'd done, every choice he'd made. She was aware that he'd expected her to be repulsed, but she didn't see a monster in him. And she wasn't sure how to tell him that.

What he'd told her, his voice deep and raw with self-loathing, with shame and agony, had stirred compassion, not revulsion. Someone had taken his strengths, and had used them to their own ends, had taken his love and caring, his loyalty to his family and his trust in them and had broken them all apart, leaving him with nothing. And he was still fighting. She wondered if those manipulators could see that. Wondered if they knew that they'd underestimated the depths of the pawn they'd chosen. He would fight until his last breath, until the last drop of blood was gone from his veins. Not nurture, she thought, staring at the lake. That was his nature. And, she admitted unwillingly to herself, it was what drew her, what filled her with a longing much too strong to ever let him see.

She knew how he felt about family. How much he needed that. It wasn't something she was ever going to be able to give him.

So.

* * *

_**Pennsylvania**_

Jo ducked as the fist whistled through the air above her, balanced on one foot, the end of the spear scything around behind her to touch the demon. The explosion of falling ash coated her from head to foot and she shook herself as she got to her feet, wiping disgustedly at the stuff over her eyelashes and mouth.

The clearing held eight loose piles of ashes and no demons. At least Dean would be able to get close to Lucifer with this, she thought, looking at Peter as she walked back to him.

"Check the others," she said, kneeling down beside Ty and laying the spear alongside her.

Ty's eyes opened and she smiled at him automatically. "Hey."

"Hey," he said back, wincing as a deep breath hurt. "You need to get going."

"We will," she told him calmly. "As soon as I've got these cleaned and dressed."

"Don't think I'm going to make it all the way home, Jo," he said.

"You will."

"Jo, don't waste effort on something that can't be fixed."

She stopped and looked at him. "Don't you even think about giving up, Ty. I won't stand for it. You are coming home with me, and Ray or Kim are going to fix you, you understand?"

He sighed softly. He didn't want to argue with her and he nodded tiredly. She looked around as Peter walked back to them.

"Risa's dead," he said softly. "Michael took a hit in the stomach."

Jo nodded, biting her lip as she thought of the impossibility of doing anything for the young hunter. "You give him something?"

"Yes," Peter said, crouching beside her. "It should keep him under until it's over."

"Okay."

"How's Ty?" Peter looked at the man in front of them.

"He's broken a couple of ribs," she said clinically. "I think one of them is bent enough to hit his lungs, so we have to tape them tight for the trip home. He took a hit in the shoulder, through and through. It's clean now."

Peter glanced at her, and nodded slowly. "I'll hold him while you tape."

Jo raised her head, throwing him a grateful look. "We'll give him the strongest painkillers we've got."

"How much further to your base?"

"About two days, constant drive," she told him.

"We'll split shift," Peter said decisively. "Is it safe to stop for fuel?"

"Yeah, most of the places we just need to siphon up the gas from the underground tanks."

"Good."

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Rufus leaned against the front panel of the truck, watching the group of men surrounding the big tractor as they loaded the seeders. The fields in every direction were green, and the verges on both sides of the gravel road leading into the farmyard were thick and lush with spring growth. He could hardly believe it after seeing the devastation left by Baal and his plagues.

Two people walked out from the barn, a tall man with bright, wheat-gold hair, and a smaller woman, maple hair tied back, a thick binder under one arm and a notebook in her hand. They stopped at the gate, and he watched Alex pull out her pen and make more notes in the book she was never without. She nodded and Dave turned away, walking back to the tractor.

Rufus straightened up and walked around to the driver's door as Alex continued up the road to him.

"You all done here?" he asked her, opening his door as she opened the passenger door.

"Yeah, I think so," she said, pushing the binder across the seat and climbing in. "A lot of what we harvest this year has to go to seed for next year, so it's going to be hard to know how much we'll have until harvest time. One bout of bad weather puts us right back where we started."

He started the truck and reversed onto the verge, spinning the wheel and turning the truck around.

"Looks like we got a reprieve," he said, gesturing at the fields surrounding them. "Don't think it'll be screwed up now."

She nodded, closing her notebook and tucking the pen back into her jacket pocket. "You didn't have to bring me out here, Rufus," she said.

"Well, until Jo and Ty get back, we're more or less just waiting, so it's no trouble," he said, shrugging. "How's Dave handling the new recruits?"

She smiled. "He says that most of them wouldn't know a tractor from a barn, but they're learning. He's more worried about how far they'll need to extend the seeding than he is about who he's got to work with."

"We'll see about getting him some more people to keep watch." Rufus turned off the gravel road to the camp and onto the blacktop that lead through town back to Chitaqua.

"Personal question, Alex?"

She looked at him warily. "Sure. Maybe."

"You and Dave, you get on fine," he said, feeling for the right words. "I know he wanted a lot more before Christmas. I thought you might've too. What happened?"

"Nothing happened really," she said, exhaling. "It didn't work out."

"Why?"

She blinked at the bluntness of the question, looking at him. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because I don't get it," he said frankly, lifting a brow at her. "You don't strike me as playing for the other team. I've known you more than two years now and you've turned down everyone who's asked."

"So … basically, you're just being nosy?"

He snorted. "Yeah, basically, I am."

She turned away, looking out through the side window for a few moments before she answered. "He wanted a family, kids."

"And?" he prompted, wondering what the problem was with that. She'd always been good with kids that he'd seen.

She gave him a very dry look. "And you saw the newspapers reports on what happened, Rufus."

He frowned. She hadn't raised that with him before. Dean had told him that she'd clammed up tight when he'd told her what he'd found out. He'd been expecting a tirade from her, but she hadn't mentioned it … until now.

"You didn't want to have a family after that?" he asked tentatively.

He heard her deep sigh. "I can't have a family, Rufus," she said, her voice low. "The damage that was done … the doctors couldn't fix it. No children."

Under the matter-of-fact tone there was a lot of something, he thought. Pain, grief, other things he couldn't identify. "I'm sorry … but Dave wouldn't have cared about that?"

"No, he said he didn't," she said, straightening up in her seat, her arms crossing over her chest as she leaned against the passenger door. "He was positive, at first. But I told him to think about it. Not just skim over it, but really think about it."

"And he figured –"

"Nothing wrecks a relationship like impossible expectations," she said, cutting him off.

It was a brave new world with a fraction of the population it'd had before the virus and the Apocalypse, he thought. There probably wouldn't be too many men who wouldn't want to have kids, their own kids, the imperative as strong as it was in wartimes.

"Alex …"

"Rufus, I'm fine, he's fine," she said firmly, not looking at him. "Let's just leave it at that, okay?"

"Sure."

* * *

"Dean!"

He turned around at the shout, and saw Dave walked up the road toward him.

"Yeah?"

"Renee told me I can't volunteer for Atlanta," Dave said, stopping beside the car.

"Yeah," Dean said, shrugging slightly. "Doctors, farmers, people we need to keep going here, you're all off the hook."

"I don't want to be off the hook," Dave said. "I want to do my part. There are a few other guys here who can look after the farms if I don't make it back."

The corner of Dean's mouth lifted slightly at that. "Well, the consensus is that you're the one who really knows what's needed. You're needed here more than we need you to be cannon fodder."

"Consensus?"

"General consensus," Dean explained patiently. "All the camps put together the must-stay people and you made the list." He looked around. "Besides, these people are depending on you, you've got a girl, what the hell do you want to go fight the devil for?"

Dave looked away. "I'm fit and I can handle weapons."

"Not enough," Dean said, a trace of finality in his voice. "Stay here and do what you're good at."

"Guess I don't have a choice in that."

Dean looked at him, wondering at the man's reluctance. "Nope. You don't."

"Are you heading back to Chitaqua?"

"In a few, yeah."

"Can you give Alex a message?"

"Okay," he said warily. "What's the message?"

"She asked me how many we'd need to protect the new ground we've been seeding," Dave said, pulling out a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handing it to Dean. "If we have another couple of look-out towers like we've built around South Farms, we can reduce the number from twenty down to about ten."

Dean frowned at the paper. "That going to be enough?"

"It should be fine, everyone in pairs and plenty of guns and ammunition up there with them. The main thing is to have an early enough alarm system that people can get back to camp before they're flanked."

"Alright, I'll let her know." He refolded the paper and put it in his pocket.

"Is she alright?" Dave asked suddenly, looking at the ground.

"Alex?" Dean hedged, not sure he wanted to get into a conversation about her.

"Yeah. She was up a week ago, and she seemed kind of … I don't know … down about something." Dave gave a helpless shrug. "She said she was fine, but you know, we were pretty close for awhile and I get kind of worried about her."

Dean looked at him, curiosity overcoming his reticence. "What happened with you two, anyway?"

"Well, a couple of things, I guess," Dave said, shifting his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other. "She said she couldn't have kids, told me to think it over real hard because she knew that I wanted them, wanted a family. She was right about that. At first, I kind of glossed it over, told her that there were enough orphans in the camps to make that unimportant, but after a while I realised that I did want my own. And I realised I would feel like I was missing something if I couldn't have them with her."

Dean looked down the road toward the gate, half-listening to the man. The attack had killed the baby she'd been carrying, he thought, remembering the news reports. Probably damaged everything else beyond repair. It hadn't occurred to him before, the longer reaching consequences, but it made some of the things she'd said, some of the things she'd done understandable. Painfully understandable. He pushed those thoughts aside as he realised that Dave have stopped talking.

"And the other thing?" he asked.

"Oh, I got the feeling that she was already sweet on someone else," Dave said. "I didn't think much about it at the time because there didn't seem to be anyone else that I could see around, but it was just a feeling, at the back of my mind, that she would sometimes be thinking about someone else."

Dean looked away, not sure what he could say to that.

"So, uh, is she okay?" Dave asked.

"Yeah," he said, opening the driver's door. "Yeah, she seems okay. I'll pass along the info on the guards."

"Good, thanks," Dave said, standing back off the road as the engine started and the Impala pulled out.

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

The thump of the walking stick on the hard floors was clear through the lower floors as Bobby walked down the hall from his bedroom to the library.

"What's happening?" he barked at Jerome as he thumped his way across the library floor to the stairs.

"Jo and Ty and Peter got into Chitaqua this morning," Jerome said, turning to watch the hunter's slow progress down the stairs. "They have the Spear."

"Well, that's somethin'," Bobby said, coming up beside Acker's wheelchair. "We'll head out then."

"Singer, this place is going to be able to see more of what happens in Atlanta than the camps will –" Jerome said, marshalling his arguments.

Bobby laid his hand on the other man's shoulder for a moment, cutting him off. "I know. I know it's probably a damned fool idea to go back right now, Jerome. I know. But I have to, and Ellen has to. They're our people, our family, and we can't sit here, safe and sound, just watchin' while they risk their lives."

Jerome cleared his throat. "Alright, I think Oliver and Ted want to go back. And Taylor."

"We'll take them," Ellen said from the doorway, looking at Jerome. "I'm sorry, Jerome, but I have to get back there."

He shrugged lightly. "Stay in touch. With all the chapters, Ellen. We'll keep researching."

"We will."

He thought of the revelation that had come to him in the night. "One more thing."

They both looked at him.

"I'm not sure it's right, you understand," he said slowly. "But it's possible, anyway."

"What?" Bobby asked impatiently. He was more than ready to be gone.

"About Alex's dreams," Jerome continued, ignoring him. "In our training, the higher training, there's a technique that we were taught. It's a dangerous one, and a difficult one. I only remembered it because of something my teacher told me when he was teaching it. I've never used it in actual need before."

"Get to the jackpot, Ackers," Bobby said, frowning at him.

* * *

_**Camp Sable, Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Clarence watched the guards opening the gates as he drank the cup of hot coffee. In another hour, the roads would be filled with people, moving from one camp to another, heading out to the farms for the day's work, and he would blend in smoothly, one more among many. He'd left his pack down by the rapidly regrowing woods near Huron's shore, and he would pick up a boat further down the coast, leaving no trail to Ohio, and risking no chance of encountering a supply team coming up the Twenty-Three.

It was just as well he'd delayed his leaving for a couple more days to get rid of the head-cold, he thought. The extra information he'd picked up when the hunters had returned from the coast had been gold. The camps were now so big that no one really noticed an extra person here or there, and he'd gone straight to Chitaqua when he'd heard the news. He'd wondered briefly if it wouldn't pay him to bug the office Winchester used for his meetings, but Alex had begun to look at him curiously and he'd vetoed the idea. Better to leave unnoticed with less, than try for more and be caught.

He finished the coffee and took the cup back to the kitchen, nodding and smiling to everyone he passed. Then he walked out of the house and down the gravel road, lifting a hand in greeting to the guards and walking out and down toward the lake. It might take him several days to get to Ohio, he thought. From there he could find a vehicle, and the rest of the trip south would only take two or three days, moving along the back roads.

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

"You better come see this," Rufus said, sticking his head through the doorway of the office.

Dean frowned down at the map he was working on. "Can it wait?"

"Nope." He disappeared and Dean heard his boots along the hall.

"Better be good," he muttered. He had the rough outline of how to handle the city, but it needed such tight timing he'd been trying to figure out another way. He got up and walked around the desk, going out the through the door and down the hall, his mind still wrestling with the logistics of the city that Lucifer was occupying.

Coming through the hall, he stopped dead. Bobby was standing in the front doorway, Ellen beside him.

_Standing_.

"What the –?" Dean said, walking slowly to him, his gaze taking in the stick, the old man's ear-to-ear grin and Ellen's laugh distractedly. "When –?"

"Thought we'd surprise you," Ellen said, glancing sideways at Rufus.

"This for real?" Dean looked at Bobby.

"Real as magic," Bobby said, taking a couple of steps into the house. He didn't need to lean on the stick so much now, but the long drive had taken its toll. He'd work out the kinks gradually.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Dean snapped abruptly, brows drawn together. "Thought we agreed that you two would sit this one out in Kansas?"

"Well, we changed our minds," Ellen said evenly, her eyes narrowing a little at his tone.

He caught her expression and shook his head. "It's safer there."

"Nowhere's safe, Dean," Bobby argued. "And we couldn't wait it out there. You're gonna need all the help you can get."

"No argument," he said shortly. "But it would've made me feel better if you were there, not here."

"Suck it up," Ellen said, smiling at him. "Where's Jo?"

"Upstairs," Dean said. "Ty's still in bad shape, and she's looking out for him."

Ellen nodded and walked across the hall to the stairs. Bobby watched her go, exhaling as she disappeared from view. Dean looked at him, one brow lifted. The older man caught the expression and lifted a shoulder in a slightly sheepish shrug.

"Where're you up to?"

Dean turned back toward the office, glancing over his shoulder to watch Bobby walk after him, Rufus following.

"I've got a rough idea of how to get this happening but it's tight," he said. "I need to come up with some contingencies in case something gets screwed up."

* * *

"How do we know where Michael will be?" Jo asked, looking at the map.

"Michael will be where I am," Dean said, his gaze flicking to Bobby. "I'll say 'yes' and he'll turn up there."

Cas nodded. "He's in a vessel, he'll need to have physical contact with Dean to make the transfer."

"So … what? You stand in the circle and Michael shows, and we light it?" Emmett asked, looking from Dean to the angel.

"Yeah, we make it a big one, and as soon as it's lit, I'm out," Dean said, dropping his gaze to the floor as he said. He didn't know how fast the archangel could move. Cas had already expressed doubts that he'd make it out of the circle in time.

"Will that work?" Ellen asked doubtfully. "Won't he know it's a trap?"

"Have to hope not," Rufus said, shrugging.

"It will work," Cas said unwillingly. "He won't be able to see the circle until it's lit."

"And hopefully he won't be thinking of a trap, just the prospect of getting what he wants," Dean added.

"Then what?" Bobby looked at him.

"We'll do the same thing to Lucifer," Dean said, a little less certainly. "The two fronts will get to the gate and block it off from the demons; one staying there to make sure nothing gets out, the other one going to get the slaves. We arm 'em, and wait for the Host at the stadium. So far we've had sixteen hundred volunteers to handle those jobs. If we get another thousand slaves armed and willing to fight, we should be able to hold off the demons Lucifer already has on site. Boze and Mel are taking the gate, Emmett and Max are taking the stadium."

"Making it sound easy, Dean, gonna give us a deck of cards?" Boze said wryly. "What about here?"

He pointed to the red circles on the map.

"Plan B," Dean said, glancing at them. "Maggie, Rona, Franklin and Maurice are taking those."

"What kind of Plan B?" Jo asked, staring at him. "And by the way, what am I doing?"

"You're staying here," Dean said shortly. "You and Ellen are taking care of South Farms and Lake West. Tim's got Tawas. Vincent has Sable and Bobby'll look after Chitaqua and the town."

In the ensuing silence, everyone heard Ty's deep exhale of obvious relief.

Jo ignored it. "No, Dean. No way."

"Not negotiable, Jo."

She turned to look at her mother. "Is this your idea?"

"No, hon," Ellen said, shrugging. "Orders are orders."

"I'm not –"

"This isn't a fucking democracy, Jo," Dean snapped at her, his voice deepening with irritability. "I need people here I can trust to look after the camps so that there's something to come back to. End of discussion!"

She glared at him, but said no more and he turned away, looking back at the map.

"If everyone's clear, we'll head out midnight, tomorrow night. We need everything loaded onto the trucks by nightfall."

* * *

Bobby chewed nervously along the inside of his cheek as he wrestled with his thoughts. He couldn't work out how important Jerome's revelation was, in terms of what they were about to do, what Dean would need to know. It might not have any significance, or it might have enormous impact.

Looking at him, Ellen exhaled gustily. "I don't see how it's going to help."

He glanced up at her and shook his head. "I'm not sure of that either. But I gotta gut feeling that it's somethin' he needs to know."

Getting to his feet, he walked around the desk, leaning on the stick. When he'd been in the chair, he'd been impatient to be out of it. Now, he was impatient to be able to walk fast, without the damned stick. _Ingrate_, he told himself derisively. _Lot more you can do now than you could before_.

Ellen looked at his progress. "He's up with Franklin, do you want me to get him?"

"No," Bobby said, shaking his head. The longer he took, the more time he had to think about it. And think about how to explain to Dean without it sounding like some damned fairytale that the younger man would dismiss out of hand.

He stopped, and turned to look at her. "You got stuff to do, babe. You might as well get on with it. I need to take my time with this anyway."

She looked at him doubtfully for a moment, then nodded, turning away and heading out. Bobby followed her, the end of the stick thumping along the floor as he headed for the front door.

"_I never used it because I couldn't," Jerome had said to them. "The soul … the soul is powered by one thing, only one key can unlock that power, and I – I never – anyway, I couldn't do it, although I understand the way it's done."_

Bobby understood it as well. There had been one moment in his life when he'd reached for a power in himself, enough power to lock down a demon and hold it tight while he'd turned a long, serrated knife into his guts. He didn't remember the details of that moment, didn't remember exactly what he'd done. He remembered how he'd felt, looking into the desperate eyes of the man he'd half-raised, the man he thought of as his own boy, his own family. He remembered the surge of fear and the demon's laughter echoing through his mind, and he remembered the feeling that had overridden both, filling him and wrapping around the alien presence inside of him and flooding him with a strength and purpose and peace he'd only felt with Karen.

How in the name of hell was he going to explain that to Dean, he wondered humourlessly?

* * *

_**Camp Sable, east Lake Tawas, Michigan**_

Max sat in the office, her hands curved around a rapidly cooling mug of coffee, eyes half-closed in the strong sunlight that flooded the windows behind her as she thought through the logistics of getting seventeen hundred plus change from Michigan to Georgia without attracting any more attention than was inevitable.

Three or four groups, maybe. Different routes. It wouldn't be so difficult to get to the coast and come into the state from the west now, she considered. It would be hot, further south. That raised a dozen other problems but they'd be on the move, and she thought that basic hygiene practices would probably deal with most of them. Had God resurrected mosquitos along with the plants?

"Max?"

She opened her eyes and looked over at the door, seeing Alex standing there. "Hey, what can I do for you, Alex?"

She'd found herself liking the other woman as she'd gotten to know her, Alex's private nature and pragmatic approach to problems similar to her own. She had the feeling that that liking was shared by the others as well, Emmett and Boze and Rufus had all taken to her, despite the initial hunter-centric suspicions when they'd found out she was somehow talking to Dean's brother down in Atlanta.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," Alex said, looking at the piles of files and paperwork in front of the Sable camp co-leader. "Clarence was around the other day asking about the livestock numbers and I wondered if he got back to you on them?"

"Who's Clarence?" Max asked, frowning.

Alex hesitated. "He came in with Boze and Rufus, from Austin. He said you'd asked him to help out with getting numbers for trading."

"I haven't asked anyone to do anything, Alex," she said slowly. "What'd this guy look like?"

"Older, in his fifties, I think. Dark hair, greying out at the sides, fair skin," Alex said, remembering the last time she'd seen him. "Rufus said he drove one of the buses in, kept people calm."

"And he settled with us?"

Alex nodded, feeling doubt uncoiling in her stomach. "Renee said he'd been over at Tawas. We should have checked with you first, but he seemed on the level."

"Alright." Max got up and came around the desk. "Let's find out."

She walked out and down the hall, Alex following her. At the front door she saw Martin and stopped.

"Martin, you know a guy called Clarence?"

"Sure," he said, looking from her to Alex and back. "Old guy, carries a notebook around."

"That'd be him," Max said sourly. "Get a half dozen people who know him and go and find him. Now," she added when he didn't move immediately.

"Yeah, okay," he muttered, about-facing and heading back out.

"Nothing he got from us would be compromising or revealing," Alex said quietly.

Max nodded. "No, that crap was a cover."

"Weaknesses?" Alex asked. "Or the details of when you all leave for Atlanta?"

"All of that, I guess," Max said, chewing on the corner of a fingernail. "Look, he might be here, it might be a misunderstanding."

"You don't think that," Alex said, looking at her. Max sighed as she returned her gaze.

"No, I don't." She looked at the door. "Dean and Bobby in Chitaqua now?"

"I think so."

"Let's go," Max said, opening the door and walking out. "We'd better let everyone know."

* * *

_**Lake West, Tawas, Michigan**_

Jocelyn finished cleaning the rifle and began to reassemble it, her fingers moving automatically through the pieces, finding their positions. She was preparing her weapons for the next day, getting her mind around what she'd volunteered for, surrounded by a half a dozen others who were doing the same.

"How come you signed up for this, Josie?" Gary asked, turning to look at her from the corner of the table they worked at.

Lifting her head to look at him, she shrugged. "Same as you, probably," she said lightly.

He grinned at her. "I'm here for the girls."

"Okay, not the same," she said, laughing. "I don't know. The last two years I've been terrified, non-stop. The virus, then the monsters, then the demons. I'm sick of it. For the first time I feel like I can do something about that, I guess."

"You could die," he told her dryly.

"Yeah, but I could've anytime," she said, shaking her head as she reloaded the rifle, the muted click of the bullets going into the magazine a soft counter to her words. "And I wouldn't have had the satisfaction of at least taking a few with me."

"Blood-thirsty?"

She smiled. "Fed up, more."

She reinserted the full mag and slammed it home, looking around. "This is – it could be a good place, you know. Someplace to start again. But if no one stands up to fight for it … it'll fall just like all the rest."

From the other table, Ariana nodded. "The world we lived in, before everything happened, no one did anything. Everyone thought it was someone else's problem. Look where that got us. My uncle was mugged in broad daylight in the middle of a busy street, people walking past. The cops told my aunt that the neighbourhood was going to hell and there was nothing they could do. None of the people who witnessed it stopped or called anyone or anything. He was shot and he died in the hospital because no one did anything," she said in a low, tight voice. "Well, I am not one of those people. I might die … I probably will … but I won't sit and do nothing and hope that someone else takes care of it."

The soft murmur of assent filled the room, and Jocelyn lifted an eyebrow at Gary.

"You better watch yourself with these girls," she said, smiling slightly. "They're a lot tougher than they look."

* * *

_**Camp Chitaqua, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

Dean turned around slowly to look at Bobby. "She tapped into her soul?"

"That's what Jerome thinks," Bobby said with a shrug. "And, for the record, I think he's right."

"Why?" Dean asked.

Bobby looked down at his hands, resting on the desk. "I think I did the same thing, when I got a hold of that demon," he said reluctantly. "Just felt this … power … this strength, inside, and it wrapped around it and held it long enough." He looked up at Dean. "It was instinctive, I didn't know I was gonna do it or what I did, exactly, but Jerome thought I probably had."

"Alright," Dean said, shaking his head. "Is that how she could leave the room when she was sleeping? She wasn't in danger then. Why would she do it?"

"Well, according to Jerome, there's only one key," Bobby said, glancing at Ellen.

"Which is?" Dean frowned as Bobby hesitated.

"Emotion," Bobby said. "A very powerful emotion."

Dean's eyes narrowed. "Any powerful emotion?"

"No," Bobby said, looking down again. "Uh … no …"

Ellen sighed exasperatedly. "He's trying to say that it's love."

"Love?" Dean looked at her.

"Doesn't have to be the romantic kind," Rufus interjected, leaning back in the chair. "Familial, brotherly, a powerful friendship … any of those work, apparently. But yeah, love." The older hunter looked at him. "She said the first couple of dreams, it was just you in them, and Lucifer."

Dean turned to look at him, taking that in. "But … uh … that would mean –"

The door opened and Max walked in, followed by Alex. "We might have a problem."

Ellen saw Dean's gaze shift from the blonde hunter to the woman standing behind her and back, his head ducking as he refocussed on Max. She glanced at Rufus, catching the glint of amusement in the dark eyes.

"What kind of problem?"

"Clarence Dalby," Max said bluntly. "Any of you know him?"

Rufus nodded. "Came in with us from Austin, drove one of the buses."

"Well, he's gone missing and he's been telling a few lies around the place," Max said, going to Bobby's desk and pouring herself a shot of the whiskey that sat there. "I've got a bad feeling about it."

"You think he was spying?" Ellen asked worriedly.

"That's what it looks like," Max said. "He went to every camp, apparently on my orders, to get one thing or another. Had a good look around each of them. Could've been taking notes of our defences, the people we're training … anything."

"He was here," Dean said, looking at Rufus. "Said you asked him to check livestock."

Rufus nodded. "You've checked that he's gone?"

Max gave him a sour look and he shrugged.

"How long since he left?"

"Yesterday morning is the general consensus. Gate guards saw him head out then, ostensibly to Lake West. Lake West confirmed that he didn't turn up there yesterday," Max said. "If it were me, I'd have a car stashed down in town or past it, and just switched vehicles. I told Jo to take a run out to the lakeshore and sure enough, she found a car parked in the rest area, tyre tracks from another car, fresh."

"He won't go direct," Bobby said.

"No," Max agreed. "I wouldn't. We'll never find him. And we won't get to Atlanta before him. And he knows where we are, how many we have, what our fortifications and defences are … Martin said he told him all about the mines a week ago."

Dean sagged back against the desk. "Great."

"We need a contingency plan," Rufus said, looking at him. "If Lucifer sends anything up here against, we have to have a way to get the people out."

"There's iron around every compound, even the town has iron and salt in the walls around it now," Dean said, frowning. "Demons can't get through it."

"What about tanks … or Stingers or anything else he can get hold of?" Ellen asked, looking from Rufus to Dean. "We're protected from monsters and demons, but not from the freaking Army."

"Or just telling Death to send a few twisters our way, wipe out our farms and everything we've done?" Bobby added, his mind unwillingly turning over all the possibilities that the devil had at his disposal. "We can probably rebuild everything, but we need to protect the people, protect the food stores that we're building up."

"So what?" Dean looked at them in frustration. "We haven't got time to build bunkers or tunnels, we've got a few artillery guns but only a couple of people who can use 'em … how are we going to protect them?"

"We should leave," Alex said quietly from the doorway. "Get as many people and as much of our stores as we can out of here, and find someplace else to wait it out until you've done your jobs in Atlanta."

The hunters turned to look at her. "Alex, we can't, that'll take more time than we've got," Bobby said. "And everyone will be a sitting duck in a huge convoy along the roads."

"Then we divide them up," she countered, looking at him. "We've got almost five thousand people here, Bobby. A couple of thousand will go with you," she added, glancing at Dean. "But the rest can't defend these camps if he sends a big force against us."

"He won't be able to," Rufus said abruptly. "He'll know we're coming down to meet him, he doesn't have enough demons down there as it is, with the Host hovering over him."

"Rufus is right," Dean said. "And he wouldn't anyway. He doesn't think that the camps will be a threat once we go."

Alex looked away, feeling her stomach churn. She didn't want to argue with them, it wasn't her place to debate the strategy with them. Their assertions weren't doing anything to assuage the fear she felt though.

"Tawas, Sable and the two southern camps have tunnels, reinforced, deep … they'll hold people safely in an attack," Dean told her. "And the way the basement here is made, even if the house was brought down, those rooms wouldn't collapse."

"We'll stay put," Bobby said, looking around at the others. "Lay out more mines, make sure every approach is watched, twenty-four/seven. We've got Stingers and ack-acks of our own to use."

"Max, tell Franklin and Mel to get the artillery out and mounted, every camp. Training on it for those who are staying." Dean looked around at her. "We can delay our leaving by a day, if they need it."

Emmett's partner nodded and put her glass down on the desk, walking past Alex and out. Alex watched her go and turned as well.

"Alex," Rufus said. "It'll be okay here."

She stopped and glanced back at him over her shoulder, nodding once, then kept going.

"Anyone got any ideas as to why we never, ever, get a break?" Dean asked no one in particular, looking at the floor.

* * *

Dean sat on the bed in his cabin, the duffle open beside him, the wrapped spear in his hands. The lamp light caught the edge of the leaf-shaped head, and he turned it slightly, looking at the uneven rust-coloured pattern that ran from the tip to the haft. Someone had run the little pig-sticker in deep, he thought.

God's blood, Peter Andante had said. And the betrayal of Lucifer would ignite it, would burn through the angel with his Father's own wrath. He hoped that wasn't just a nice story, hoped it would do the job. It wasn't the only problem, naturally. In Heaven there was a faction who'd planned all of this, planned it through the centuries and were waiting it for all to come to fruition. He wondered if they would act, if he actually managed to kill Lucifer. He wondered uneasily if Michael knew of it, was a part of it. That would change things.

Wrapping the head back in the layers of cloth, he slid the spear, bundled together in two halves, back into the duffle and zipped it up. Franklin, Mel, Terrence and a number of other ex-army civilians had been working all day to get the armaments installed and checked, and the taciturn hunter had told him at nightfall that they'd be able to go as planned, before dawn the next morning. He was ready.

He picked up the bag and carried it out into the living room, setting it by the front door. For a moment he stood there, looking at the door. He'd thought about going to see Alex several times already, once even managing to get through the door and down the porch steps. What had stopped him each time was the awkward knowledge that he didn't know what he would say when he got there. _Hi, Bobby told me you could tap into your soul because you're in love with me_ … didn't really fly as a conversational opener, he thought sourly, turning away from the door again.

He hadn't taken two strides when the knock sounded behind him and he jumped at the unexpectedness of it. Turning around, he walked back and opened the door. Alex stood on the porch, a file in one hand, looking at her watch.

"Hey."

"Hi," she said, looking up at him. "This too late for you?"

"No, what've you got?" He stood to one side and closed the door as she walked in.

"Rufus said you needed to see these," she said, turning to face him and handing him the file.

Dean looked at it bemusedly. The file held thirty medical reports on some of the civilians who'd volunteered. He'd looked at them earlier. _Get off my back_, he thought sourly, feeling the older hunter's sticky fingers against him.

"Thanks, yeah, I needed to make sure, uh, that they were all good to go," he lied, keeping his gaze on the reports.

"Okay," Alex said, looking around the room.

"Uh … actually, I wanted to talk to you about something," Dean said, taking the file to the table and putting it down.

Alex turned where she stood. "Yeah?"

"About the dreams …" he said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the long sofa. "If you had another one?"

She looked from him to the sofa and back, shaking her head. "No, I – I'm taking Merrin's pills."

"Huh," he said, edging toward the sofa. "Uh … because Bobby said that Jerome thought he knew how you were doing it, the disappearing, I mean."

"He does?" Alex watched him intently. "How?"

"He said you're … uh … tapping into the power of your soul," Dean said, stopping a few feet from the sofa, looking back at her.

"What?" Alex frowned. "What does that mean?"

Dean smiled uncomfortably. "I'm not really sure myself. Sit down."

She walked slowly around to the sofa, sitting at one end and looking at him as he sat in the middle.

"Apparently, the soul has a lot of power, enough to teleport, pull off all kinds of shit," he explained.

"Wouldn't I know if I was doing that?" She looked at the low table in front of her. "I mean, how could I be doing something like that unconsciously?"

"Heh … well, that's kind of the thing, the only way to do it is through an emotion, uh, Jerome says."

"An emotion? You mean, like a panic attack or something like that?"

"Something like that," he agreed readily.

"But I was sleeping, why would I be emotional when I was –" she stopped, her gaze dropping abruptly from his.

"He thinks you saw something in those dreams, that, uh … might have … upset you, caused it to happen without you realising," Dean said, very carefully.

She nodded slowly. "And when I was running, when I was afraid, that kicked it in again?"

"Uh … not really no," he said. "Getting back was possibly a rubber-band kind of effect, an automatic return flight, not the same thing as how you got there."

"I see."

"Rufus said that you told him the first couple of dreams, you just saw Lucifer … and me."

Alex looked down at her hands, entwined on her lap. "Yeah, that's right. The first one, that was in the garden, then in the hall … you looked like you were asking for something."

"Asking for something?" Dean repeated, brows drawing together as he tried to visualise what she'd seen.

"You were in front of him – in front of your brother – and you were pleading with him."

He looked away, suddenly able to see it clearly, unsure if he wanted to hear more.

"Lucifer held up his hand and there was a very bright light, too bright to look at," she continued, her eyes closed as she pulled the memory back. "Then you and he were in the hall, and you were blind."

"Blind?"

"Your eyes, they were white, all white," she said, shaking her head.

"What about the second dream?" he asked.

"Do you really want to know this?" she asked, opening her eyes and turning to look at him. "I didn't know your brother. I didn't know about Lucifer, when I had that dream."

"When was it?"

"Just before Christmas, a couple of weeks after we got back from Battle Creek," she said, looking down again.

The first year here, he thought, a little unsteadily. He'd been with Lisa. He'd already known that wasn't what he wanted.

"Jerome thinks that Lucifer might've been sending these dreams … thoughts, whatever … out for me, try and tempt me to come out of hiding," he said. And the scholar had thought that only people who were close to him might've been able to see them. He hadn't gotten them, too many other nightmares on his nightly schedule. Lisa had never mentioned dreams to him, good, bad or indifferent.

Alex sighed. "Why me? I mean, why is it possible for me to do this … tapping into my soul thing … why not you? Or someone else?"

Dean shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "Jerome doesn't know either. He said it was maybe the bloodlines, but I don't see how we could ever work out if you had them or not."

He rubbed a hand over his face. "He wants you to come and stay there, for a while. See what he can find out."

Alex smiled suddenly. "And test me and prod and poke and see what makes it all tick?"

"I guess," he said, looking at her. "You don't have to, of course."

"No," she agreed softly. "This strong emotion … that you've been careful to tiptoe around, and not name, it's not fear or anger, is it?"

He shook his head. "No."

He watched her take in a deep breath, watched her expression smooth out.

"Well … I do," she said slowly, lifting her eyes to meet his. "But you knew that."

Dean felt his heart beat stumble in his chest uncomfortably, at what she'd said, at the look in her eyes.

"I didn't," he said flatly. "I thought … after …"

He shrugged, his expression hardening a little as he turned away, and she moved along the sofa, closer to him.

"You thought I'd feel differently?" she asked him. "You thought that what you told me would kill it?"

He let out a long breath. "Yeah."

"You're not a monster, Dean," she said. "You never have been."

He didn't answer, didn't move, and only the sharp edges of his quarter-profile was visible to her.

"I know you can't believe it," she continued. "And there's nothing I can do to make you believe it. It has to be something you do for yourself."

The muscle in the point of his jaw twitched as his teeth set together. He didn't know what to for himself. Didn't know how to make amends for what he'd done, and how he'd let it feel.

"You can keep on punishing yourself, I guess," Alex said softly behind him. "It won't help. You need to find a way to understand what happened and forgive yourself for it."

He turned back to her then. "I know what happened, Alex. It's burned in. I took the easy way out. And I – I enjoyed it."

"If it was the easy way, why does it tear you up so much now?" she asked him gently. "If you'd truly enjoyed it, why would you feel so ashamed by what you did now?"

He shook his head. "This isn't – it's not – you can't get around it like that."

"For a moment, when I had my hand around Jimmy's gun, and I was looking up at him and knew I could kill him …" she paused, swallowing as the memory came back, bright and sharp. It was the only one that had. "I felt a huge … wave, I guess … of relief, so powerful that for a long time afterwards, I thought it was joy."

He stared at her. "It's not the same thing, Alex. I did those things for ten years."

"Or it was a month, and the demon made it feel like ten years."

"No – it –" he stopped, wondering if that were a possibility.

"You said you weren't there in flesh and blood," she reminded him, choosing her words carefully. "You said that your mind remembered your body because it was the only frame of reference you had."

He looked down, eyes half-closed, trying to remember, trying to remember any other point that might make that true … somehow.

"To the mind, time is irrelevant," Alex said quietly. "Everything is irrelevant. We receive input … data of some sort … and the mind processes it the best way it can."

"It doesn't really matter, does it?" He looked at her. "A month or ten years."

"I think it does, because you've accepted that you let evil in over that time," she said. "And I don't think you've realised that you didn't."

Everything he'd thought, everything he'd felt – about Hell, himself, what he'd done, what had been done to him – everything was spinning in his head, cut loose from the framework he'd had for it, everything possible again. He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, unconsciously trying to stop it and dragged in a low, whistling breath.

"If I deprived you of your senses, even for a few days, and then told you ten years had passed, you wouldn't be able to tell if that was the truth or not," she said, watching him struggle with it. "And you said that things happened down there, things a lot more disorienting than that."

"Stop," he said, his head bowed. "Just stop."

She nodded, shifting slightly away from him and getting to her feet. Dean's head lifted, his eyes tracking her as she walked for the door.

He didn't want her to go, he realised, the thought penetrating as she walked away from him. Not at all. He was on his feet and across the room, hands closing around her shoulders.

Alex looked up at him as she felt the strength in his grip, immediately loosened.

"Don't – I'm sorry," he said. "It's – I – kind of threw everything I thought upside-down there."

"I know. I didn't mean to make it harder," she said, looking away from him.

"Why didn't you say something, before?"

"I couldn't think of a way to drop it gracefully into a conversation," she said, very lightly.

Dean sucked in a deep breath, the corner of his mouth lifting a little. "You trying to make me feel better?"

She shook her head. "No, trying to make me feel better."

Under his fingers, he could feel the faint tremble in her shoulders. "Are you scared of me, Alex?"

"No," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "Just scared."

"Of what?"

She looked up, smiling nervously. "The list is extensive."

He bent his head slowly, giving her the time to move if she wanted to. She didn't, and relief filled him, mingled with the sensation of the touch of his mouth on hers.

Soft lips, yielding and pliant, and he felt himself shaking as his arms went around her, drawing her tight against him, flooded with a surge of emotion and perception. A thundery, shivery feeling, deep inside, and he couldn't tell if that was an emotion or if it was physical.

He couldn't ever remember feeling this nervous, this charged with need and want, acutely conscious of every inch of his skin, and where it touched hers. His heart was galloping in his chest, his breath ragged in his throat, and when her arms slipped around his neck, her fingers slid through his hair, he felt a spiralling heat rising through him, uncoiling and sending shocks through his nerves.

He backed her slowly across the room, a part of his mind still functioning, still aware of his surroundings and where he was in them. Aware of their clothing, fingers fumbling with buttons and zippers and folds of fabric, peeling them away as she stopped, the backs of her legs against the side of the bed.

He'd had good sex and fun sex, drunken sex and goofy sex and toe-curling sex and insatiable sex … once or twice he'd even had boring sex; he'd tried most conceivable positions and any available location; he'd been revelling in the bodies of women for the last sixteen years but he'd never felt the combination of unbearable excitement and aching longing that he felt right now, every nerve thrumming in anticipation, desire fluxing through him like sheet lightning, flickering from head to foot and hypersensitising every touch, every sound, every sight and taste and smell until he wasn't aware of anything else.

Wanting too much, needing too much, he couldn't find a shred of control, couldn't find enough air to breathe. He had to stop as her fingers slid over his skin, unable to endure the deep tremors that followed their path, so fucking ready to explode he caught her hands and rolled her onto her back, his eyes closed, cheek resting against the slope of her breasts, trying to shut her out for a minute, for a second, until he could find where he was again.

He'd never been able to _just_ have sex. It was the only way he knew to have the intimacy he'd craved, to be himself without words or lies or the need to explain. He sensed the needs in the women he was with and fulfilled them as thoroughly as he knew how, and it'd been why he'd left behind a trail of women who'd dreamed of him long after he'd gone.

It was different this time. He still felt her, felt her responses to his touch, that instinctive knowledge still razor keen and able to anticipate, but she seemed to feel him in the same way, and his reactions to her caresses, to the softness of her mouth, the feel of her tongue, the frictionless glide of silken skin over his, kept jacking him up, he couldn't separate any of it and everything he was used to, everything that he usually did or felt, that was gone, irretrievably lost in a sea of sensation that pushed him faster than he wanted to go.

Her lips along the sensitive skin of the side of his neck … her fingers slipping lightly around him, brushing over the hollow at the top of his thigh … the smell of her hair, the taste of her skin, the lift of her breasts as she arched up under him … all of it took the control he'd taken for granted his whole life and swept it away, leaving him on the edge, uncertain, shaken, longing for more.

Soft. Wet. Heat. Tight … god, so tight around him and he stopped again, staring into her eyes, the insistent throbbing between them. Deeper. Slow. Aching.

How the fuck was he supposed to last when everything was so strong, and he needed it so goddamned much. Reverberations in his chest, in his throat, humming against the insides of his lips as she lifted under him. Harder. Faster. Reacting to her again. No sense of what was him. What was her. Where he was.

Vibrations, rippling up him. Her breath, uneven, panting against his jaw. A pulsing and he couldn't hold on, couldn't stand fast against the rip of exquisite pleasure, a surge that contracted every muscle, crackled through every nerve. Two mingled cries in the darkness. And the aftershocks that shuddered through him, through her, for a long time as he held her tightly, not wanting to let go.

* * *

He woke an hour before dawn, his body heavy, relaxed and loose. Five hours. Not one dream.

Looking down at the woman who still lay in the curve of his arm, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, her skin warm against his down the lengths of their bodies, he couldn't believe it. The memories were all there, but he couldn't believe them either. Desire trickled through him and he shut it out regretfully. He had to go. Had to go and fight the devil.

Alex opened her eyes, tilting her head to look up at him and he bent his head, the kiss intensifying too quickly, both of them pulling back at the same time.

"You going now?" she asked, her voice quiet and pragmatic, no trace of the emotions he'd heard in it through the night.

"Yeah," he said, not moving. He wanted to say more. A lot more. But the words were stuck in his throat. He didn't think he was going to survive. So what was the point?

She lifted herself on one elbow, and he moved his arm as she sat up. "When we will know?"

He shook his head. "I don't know, a couple of weeks, maybe."

He wasn't used to goodbyes. He sure as hell wasn't used to goodbyes where he didn't want to go. He watched her roll away, legs swinging off the bed. She wasn't angry or unhappy, he thought, a little mystified. He watched her pull on her jeans, maple-coloured hair spilling forward over her shoulders as she did up the button. Watched her dress. Memorised it all.

"You keep your head down, if Lucifer sends anything this way," he said softly as she walked around the bed and sat on the edge, looking at him. "These people, they gotta have something to come back to."

Her mouth quirked up to one side. "We will."

Lifting her hand, she laid it lightly against the side of his face, leaning forward to kiss him. When she drew back, he opened his eyes, looking into hers.

"I do, you know," she said. "I do love you."

* * *

_**I-75 S, Kentucky**_

Dean glanced in the side-mirror, seeing the trucks and buses and carriers stretched out behind him. There were four hundred people with them, heading straight south. Boze and Franklin had another four hundred, a couple of hundred miles to the east. Emmett and Max had five hundred, well to the west. Peter and Mel, Maggie and Wayne, each leading their own convoys, all of them converging on a city to the south.

The first day out, the people – the troops, he thought a little derisively – had been excited, nervous, wasting energy, unable to sleep. By the next night, things were settling down. Last night, everyone who wasn't on watch had been bunked down and asleep as soon as they'd finished eating. Now, they rode calmly and quietly in the vehicles, some playing cards, or talking or humming. People were adaptable, he thought. More so than anyone really gave them credit for.

He leaned back against the seat, flicking a sideways glance at Rufus. The older hunter drove steadily, content with the silence in the cab of the truck. Behind them Cas was looking out the window, eyes half-closed against the bright morning light.

When they'd left the camp in the darkness, Rufus had amused himself for a couple of hours, asking how he'd slept, and if he'd got the files sent over with Alex. Dean had stayed silent, scowling when he'd realised that Rufus was laughing soundlessly in the seat next to him, shoulders shaking. It'd prompted the angel to join in, and the whole conversation had degenerated from there.

His nights hadn't been dreamless, but there'd been no nightmares. And what he felt now, instead of the cold, dull anger, laced about with fear, was a steadiness, a sense of purpose that he could do the job he'd set himself, just the way he'd planned it.

He turned his head, looking out the passenger window at the countryside beyond, filled with green again, everything growing faster, thicker.

_We're coming for you, you sonofabitch_, he said to Lucifer. _This is my world, and my brother, and you won't be getting either._


	21. Chapter 21 On A Field of Gold

**Chapter 21 On A Field of Gold**

* * *

_**Brookhaven, Atlanta, Georgia**_

Lucifer sat in the golden chair in the long white marble hall, looking out through the line of French doors to the garden, his face smooth and expressionless as Clarence finished his briefing.

The silence stretched out in the chill room, and Clarence wondered if he should say something else, or genuflect and back out of the room, when the devil turned his vessel's head to look at him.

"Thank you … it's Clarence, isn't it?" he asked, dropping his chin into his hand as he stared at the man.

Clarence nodded uncomfortably, his gaze shifting to one side. The face, the hazel eyes, seemed to be that of a young man, but the expression in them was old. And calculating.

"And the army left six days ago?"

"That's what they said, sir," Clarence confirmed. It'd seemed like an easy job, a simple way to gain some advantage over the other free civilians in the city, to get power, began to climb up the tiers of hierarchy near the head. He wasn't so sure now that it had been a good idea to put his hand up. The man sitting in front of him was frightening. A good deal more frightening than he'd imagined.

"Yes, nearly two thousand of them, marching down here to fight me," Lucifer mused. Inside, he could feel Sam's agitation, his fear. "And Winchester holds the Spear of Destiny."

"Yes, sir," Clarence said. "They said it came from an island, in the Atlantic."

Lucifer nodded, smiling a little as he thought of the location. The _Litteris Hominae_, without a doubt. They'd short-circuited more than one of his plans in the long struggle to break free. Had killed Abaddon, of all things. Still … omelettes and all that.

"You know what really astounds me about your species, Clarence?" he said, tilting his head to look up at the engraved ceiling.

Clarence wasn't sure if he should answer or not. Lucifer didn't seem to be paying attention to him.

"It's your utter lack of principle and … loyalty," the devil said slowly, gesturing around the room. "I mean, most of the population – globally – has been wiped out. The few who survived have been possessed and tortured, chained and forced to labour on my projects, and yet, there are still those of you who will volunteer to gather the information I need to wipe out those who are free and fighting me."

He lowered his gaze to the man standing in front of him. Clarence swallowed.

"I once believed that the demons were worse, with their thirst for pain and their delight in dipping their hands in the blood of others, but lately, I've had to revise that opinion," he said. "You see, I made the demons what they are. I twisted and tortured their souls, burned out everything that had shone in them. But you – and those like you – my Father made you." He looked out through the glass doors. "Made you with His own pure divine spark and gave you the ability to choose."

Clarence took a step backwards. Lucifer looked back at him.

"And you choose to do evil to each other. Actually, _deliberately_, choose it, under no duress and with no constraint."

He snapped his fingers and the man turned to dust, retaining the living shape for a second before collapsing into a pile on the floor.

He looked up at the ceiling again. "Now, why is it alright for them to choose but not for me?"

Sighing deeply, he got to his feet. _You see, Sam, what your beloved people are like?_

Two demons materialised by the door as he looked for them.

"Give the pilots the co-ordinates," he told them. "I don't want anything left up there when they've finished."

The demons nodded and disappeared. Lucifer walked to the doors that led to the garden. _Jacksonville to Michigan at Mach two point five, come on Sammy, you do the math. They'd be there just as the sun was coming up and won't Dean's friends get a hell of a surprise with their morning coffee?_

He could feel his vessel's brother, somewhere around. Couldn't see him or the army he'd led down from the north but he could feel them. He stopped as he opened the glass-paned door to the stone terrace, turning abruptly and slamming it closed behind him as he walked down the hall. There were three areas of vulnerability in the city, but the first, and the most important to him right now, was the little Baptist church in East Atlanta.

* * *

_**Loring Heights, Atlanta**_

The rumble of the diesel trucks, a long line curving around the edges of the narrow asphalt road, echoed over the water and bounced from the hill one side and the concrete buildings that lined the reservoir on the other.

Rob looked up as Paul climbed the side of the truck to perch next to him.

"Should've been fire-fighters," the dark-haired man said with a grin. "All we seem to be doing lately is filling these trucks."

Rob nodded, watching the gauge on the tanks. "How's Gideon doing?"

"Blessing away like an old Testament prophet," Paul said. "You think God's gonna listen to his prayers?"

The gauge read full and Rob uncoupled the fitting, lifting the hose from the filler hole and waving at the men who were manning the pump.

"I think we have to keep some kind of hope, Paul," he said, handing the heavy, reinforced hose line to the men standing below them. "Hope that we've got help."

Paul nodded and climbed down the side, Rob following him as the driver put the truck into first and began to move away. The second truck in the long line pulled up next to them and they climbed up the shiny side of the tanker, Paul moving to check the truck's onboard pump, as Rob took the hose and screwed it into the thread of the hole.

At the other end of the road, Maurice checked the tank gauges and climbed up beside the driver.

"Down to the airport, Emmett and Max are waiting for you, Pete," he said, glancing across at the woman sitting beside the driver. "Make sure that you stick to the western side of the city, Sue, the 139, any sign of activity and move to the back streets."

She nodded and Maurice turned and jumped down. He nodded to the four who were sitting on top of the tanker, close by the hoses, and turned away to wait for the next truck to move up to him.

* * *

On the other side of the reservoir, Rona directed another line of fire trucks and tankers eastward, to the industrial area south-east of the city.

"Go east until you're past the Botanical Garden and stay on Moreland until you get to Perimeter, okay?" She looked at Gary, one brow raised.

"Got it," Gary confirmed.

"You've got four on the deck so no wild evasions, let them do their job if anything comes at you."

"Right," he nodded. "See you on the refill."

She gave him a slight smile. There wouldn't be any refills, at least not up here. They had eighty trucks, from every town they'd been able to scrounge them along the way and the fire stations in the city itself. Two groups of slaves to be freed and armed, a hellgate to keep locked up tight, a demon army scattered across the city … the trucks would be a small but vital part of getting through and getting the enemy's numbers reduced as fast as possible, then they'd be abandoned.

* * *

Maggie stood beside Pastor Gideon on the narrow causeway between the two reservoirs.

"Lord God almighty," Pastor Gideon said quietly, "Creator of all life, of body and soul, we ask you to bless this water." He made the sign of the cross above the reservoir, and pressed the rosary in his hand against his lips. "As we use it in faith, forgive our sins and save us from all illness and the power of evil. Lord, in your mercy give us living water, always springing up as a fountain of salvation: free us, body and soul, from every danger, and admit us to your presence in purity of heart. Grant this through Christ, our Lord." Tossing the rosary into the water, he felt something pass through him, a sigh or a breath. He closed his eyes.

"Is that it, padre?" she asked, looking down at the rosary as it vanished beneath the surface of the water.

He nodded. "It's all I can do," he said, looking at the smooth surface. He'd blessed the salt that had gone into the loaded shotgun rounds as well. Better too much than too little.

"Let's get going then," Maggie said, slinging her gun over her shoulder. "We'll need you at the gate as well."

Nodding, he followed her to the line of vehicles. From the moment he'd realised that Leah was no longer his daughter, he'd found himself wrestling with the questions of his faith. Belief he had plenty of … watching life return to the blackened and charred soil of the camps, watching hope returning to the people who lived there, he couldn't doubt that they were being protected. But for himself, it was another matter. _God tests us all_, he thought bleakly. _In whatever ways He must_. But that test had been too much.

* * *

_**College Park, Atlanta**_

Max leaned against the side of the building, binoculars against her eyes, moving the glasses incrementally over the wide runways and taxi strips between them and the terminals on the other side of the airport.

"Talk to me," Emmett said from beside her, his eyes narrowed as he looked across in the same direction.

"Fifty or sixty," she said softly. "Probably more inside."

"Can we use the sprinklers?"

"Yeah, I think so," she said, shifting the glasses to the rooflines. "At least on the main terminal." She lowered the glasses and flicked a look at him. "We'll need a diversion."

He nodded. "Tankers should be here in about twenty minutes," he said, looking at his watch. "Front assault and draw them out, four for the roof tanks and two to get inside to set them off."

"We've got ten bombs, that's it," Max reminded him. "So if we're gonna use them, it should be for maximum damage."

"I'll take the front," he said, looking at the way the buildings were laid out. "Colin, Martin, Danielle and Rudy can take the tank. You and Josh are on the inside."

She nodded, tucking the binoculars back into the small bag at her side.

Emmett reached out, his hand closing her arm. "Nothing heroic, Max. Just get the sprinklers on and wait for the cavalry, alright?"

Max looked up at him in surprise, nodding after a moment as she saw a flicker of something in his eyes. Something that hadn't been between them before.

* * *

Emmett stood on the running board of the first of the water tankers, looking around the vehicles and the people he was leading. He had ten tankers and a dozen Army trucks, mounted with machine guns. Franklin had reloaded the cartridges, the 50mm bullets holding a mixture of blessed salt and powder and each engraved with the binding sigils that would hold their targets in the meatsuits with every penetration. Once the bodies were burned, the demons would be in limbo, unable to reform or escape from the ashes that would be all that remained.

The people he was leading were inexperienced, he thought uneasily. Inexperienced in fighting anything. And demons didn't just attack the flesh when they fought. They attacked the mind as well. He hoped everyone would stay calm, focus on what they needed to do. He wasn't betting they would, though.

He tapped the throat mike that lay against his larynx. "Alright people, time to go … we're goin' in full throttle, full volume, we want max confusion. You see anything that isn't on one of our vehicles and you hit it full power and knock it down!"

He banged his palm on the roof of the tanker and Greg hit the play button on the cab's stereo, shifting the truck into gear and changing up as they gained speed across the concrete runway. Emmett swung around to the ladder that went up the side of the water tank, climbing to the top and taking the hose end from Annie as the pounding bass notes vibrated through the frame under his feet. Behind them, every vehicle was moving, gaining speed, the stereos cranked up as loud as they would go, the music, mostly rock from the era when it had reigned supreme over the airwaves, a cacophonous roar, drowning out the engines and the yelling and shouting of the people who rode them.

And the demons poured out of the terminals, running this way and that, eyes black, lips drawn back in soulless grimaces as they realised they were under attack.

Emmett's truck swung around in a big circle in front of Arrivals, and the hunter and the four civilians clinging onto the top of the tanker braced themselves as the compressor kicked in and the water sprayed in a high pressure stream over the leading edge of hellspawn running to them, their movements unconsciously in time with the furious beat of _Still Unbroken_. For a split second, as the tankers pulled around the demons in a semi circle and the gunners drew beads on their targets, there was an eerie harmony between the Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Creedence, Zeppelin, The Who, Def Leppard, Floyd and the Eagles, a single note, in the different octaves, that formed a rising crescendo of accord. Then it vanished and the demons shrieked and howled and dropped as water blasts and machine gun fire ripped across their numbers.

* * *

Colin ran across the roof, doubled over below the gable line, hearing the soft thud behind him. He had the book of Common Prayer in one hand, the ebony rosary wrapped tightly around it, and his shotgun, loaded with blessed salt in the other, his eyes fixed to the tank at the far end. Even running, they could hardly hear their own noise, the music and screams, both agonised and triumphant, filling the airport and echoing from the metal and cinderblock walls, from the concrete and glass of the terminal buildings.

* * *

Pressed tight against the rear side of the terminal, Max bit her lip to keep from laughing as she watched the melee on the apron in front of the building. She could hear Emmett's voice, a whiskey-rough baritone, yelling out the words of the defiant song, in snatches over the roar of gunfire, the hiss of the pressurised hoses, the screams of the fallen. The demons were panic-stricken, running in every direction, trapped within the circle of gunfire and water, their skin steaming and bubbling and sloughing off as the holy water saturated them.

"Ready."

The single word sounded quietly in her earpiece, and she tapped the young man standing beside on the shoulder, taking a step back from the side door and jumping forward. Her booted foot hit the door precisely above and slightly to one side of the lock, and it burst free of the jamb, swinging inwards and hitting the wall.

_Don't need to go too far in_, Max thought, her eyes following the run of pipes along the ceiling of the long corridor. The first office had what she wanted, and she jumped smoothly to the top of the desk, lighter out and flame flickering under the petal-like metal protuberance. It took five seconds of steady heat and the sprinklers came on, soaking her and Josh, standing by the door and watching the corridor. Deeper inside the building, she heard screams and she dropped to the floor, tucking her lighter back in her pocket and swinging the barrel of her rifle up. She looked past Josh up the hall, and nodded, slipping out and running soundlessly through the misting water toward the interior of the terminal.

* * *

_**Smyrna, Atlanta, Georgia**_

Dean looked at the edge of the city that lay just beyond their position. He'd be splitting off from the rest here with Rufus and Cas, heading east to Brookhaven while Boze and Sean took the army to the hellgate at the corner of Cummings and Gibson, east of midtown.

Rufus walked over to him, handing him a headset. "Angus got the comms up. Time for us to get going."

Slipping the earpiece in, Dean shifted the throat mike on his neck and nodded. "Where's everyone at?"

"Emmett and Max got their tankers, they should be hitting the terminals by now," Rufus said, fiddling with the earpiece. "Maggie called in and said she and Gideon are on their way to East Atlanta. Boze is already there, a couple of blocks back from the gate. Franklin and Mel are waiting in the freight yards for the tankers to get there."

Dean glanced over his shoulder at Castiel. "You ready?"

The angel nodded, slinging a rifle over one shoulder, a green duffel over the other, straightening up and following Dean down the hill. He thought that the increased beating of his heart, the soft rush of fear through his veins meant that he was feeling fear. It was novel, yet unpleasant. He hoped uneasily it wasn't an indicative omen of the outcome of their endeavour.

* * *

_**Jacksonville, Florida**_

On the ribbon of smooth concrete, ten planes waited in the darkness. Around them the ground crew and pilots scurried, fuelling, loading the armaments, running the system and flight checks, the demons inside keeping a thread of control over the men, but not interfering with their knowledge or their skills.

"Target?" The wing leader looked at the man standing beside him.

"Michigan," the captain said tersely. "East Tawas, 44.28556°N, 83.48917°W . The camps are spread around it. We'll eyeball from there."

The pilot standing beside him looked up as the bombs were loading under the wings. The LGBs were heavy payloads for the fighter planes. Their deployment only meant one thing. "Leaving craters only?"

"Affirmative. No survivors. Orders are specific on that point."

"Enemy of the State?"

"Something like that," the captain said, looking at his plane. "Enough chatter, formation take off in T-minus ten minutes. Approximate ETA will be sixty-five minutes." He turned abruptly and walked to the first plane along the strip, climbing the short ladder and easing himself into the narrow cockpit. The hatch lowered over him and he looked over the instrumentation crowding the panels in front and to the sides, pulling his helmet from the hook beside the seat.

The upper limb of the sun broke over the flat horizon as the engines began to whistle, and the F-15C taxied slowly across the apron to the runway that ran north-south. Pushing the throttle forward, the captain watched the speed increase, ignoring the rush of the ground under him, the buildings that flashed by beside him. The nose lifted and the plane climbed into the wide expanse of silver sky, pink and gold light outlining the edges of the aircraft and the wispy streamers of cloud that stretched across the heavens northwards, pointing the way.

* * *

_**Forest Park, Atlanta**_

Mel glanced at the older man beside him, as Franklin muttered to himself.

"What?"

"Need something to let us get in without them attacking in the first five seconds," Franklin growled, staring at the two buildings that held the slaves. There had to be something. The tankers were there, and they could take care of anyone who tried to get outside but the buildings didn't have roof tanks for their sprinkler system, and he thought that if they just went in, guns blazing, it might end up as a massacre instead of a rescue.

"What about those?" Mel looked across the asphalt parking lot, eyes narrowing as he recognised the structures.

Franklin turned to follow his gaze, and a slow, reluctant smile creased his face.

"Yeah … I think they'll do nicely," he said, turning to look at the lean, ex-Marine. "I like the way you think."

Mel grinned self-consciously.

* * *

The necessary modifications took almost two hours. Mel glanced around as Franklin climbed down the last tower.

"How much extra juice did you route in?"

Franklin grinned humourlessly at him. "A lot. They'll last about three minutes I think, before they burn out, but they'll be brighter than the sun till they do."

"Is that enough time?"

"Have to be," the older man said prosaically. "We're gonna want a teeny diversion just before, to bring them to the front of the building."

He looked over the broad stretch of parking lot between the two buildings. "Maybe something along the lines of the Keystone Cops …"

Mel followed his gaze, thinking of the vehicles they had. Could work. "I'll go get some volunteers."

* * *

The demon looked around the interior of the terminal uneasily. It was well past time that the buses should've been here, loading up the meat. It wasn't just another work day. They were needed. The land lines were down, and that was more worrying since it didn't have an alternative means of communication with the chain of command.

They held more than sixteen hundred people here, in the two monstrous buildings that had once belonged to FedEx. Most of them were thin and pale, sores weeping from the chains that bound ankles and wrists, shadows in the hollows of their faces and in their eyes. For the past two years, they'd worked every day, taken out to clean the buildings of bodies and rubble, clean the streets and provide the muscle for the rebuilding. But today was different. Today the gate would be opened. It was an old gate, and it had been closed and sealed for a millennia. And it would need a lot of blood.

In the distance there was the sound of an engine, red-lining as it climbed through the gears. The demon frowned, walking over to the broad, plate-glass wall that constituted the front of the building, where once there'd been a showroom and offices. The engine got louder, the sound bouncing between metal walls as the car screamed around the corner of the building, a second low-to-the-ground car hot on its tail, the two of them spinning out in a cloud of white smoke as they reached the front, the turns too tight and the engines stalling on the missed gear change.

Four men struggled to get out of the vehicles as a bright red fire brigade water tanker roared around the corner, braking hard next to the cars, men and women crouched on the roof pulling out hoses and spraying them over the vehicles. The demon's eyes widened as the men from the two cars began to scream, dropping to the ground and rolling around the concrete. They'd been warned of this … Winchester's army coming into the city. It hadn't realised it would happen this soon.

"It's an attack!" it yelled, and the eyes of every demon in the building flicked to black as they surged toward the glass wall.

It wasn't sure what happened next. Perhaps half of the demon force inside the building had made it out through the doors, running for the tanker, slowing as another two tankers came around the other side of the building and water sprayed over them. The rest were close to the glass wall when the world was enveloped in a brilliant white light, blinding them completely.

From behind them, the doors on the other side of the warehouse burst open, men and women racing inside, closing the distance and trapping the demons against the glass. There was a soft whoompf noise inside the warehouse and an expanding light and then nothing.

* * *

Mel threw the second demon bomb down, catching a group in the corner, throwing his arm up over his face as the explosion lit up the corner like a magnesium flare. The light died and he saw the shadows, burned against the glass, burned _into_ the glass, he thought, looking at it more closely. He heard the explosions outside, showers of sparks from the over-charged stadium lights that lined the parking lot and the softer whumps of the demon bombs and looked out, seeing the tankers hosing the few remaining demons together, the swing of Alicia's arm as she threw the last bomb into the centre of them.

"Bolt cutters! Need some bolt cutters here," Ray yelled, crouching near the slaves. The tools were passed around and the lengths of chain were cut and thrown aside.

Franklin walked into the building, shifting his bag higher onto his shoulder as he stopped in front of the people crowded at the back of the warehouse.

"Okay, folks, take a few deep breaths," he bellowed, looking around at them. "We're getting you out of here."

* * *

_**Vinings, Atlanta**_

The house was huge, set on an acre of gardens, and it was bare and empty. Dean walked through the rooms silently, aware that Rufus and Cas were prowling the levels above and below him, unable to hear them.

He looked at the smooth bare parquetry floor of the large living room thoughtfully. This would probably the best place. There were doors at either end and the curving breast of the chimney would give Cas a place to stand, not readily noticed. He whistled softly, a two-tone that penetrated through the silent rooms and set his duffel on the floor, pulling out the heavy ceramic bottle and easing the waxed wooden stopper from its neck, jerking his head back as the strong scent hit him.

Castiel took the holy oil from him as the angel walked into the room, moving around the centre of the floor in a perfect circle. He was glad to see that Cas was making it a big circle. He still wasn't sure he was going to have enough time to get out before the archangel grabbed him.

"So you call him, and he turns up, and we light the fire?" Rufus said, watching the angel finish the circle and lift the bottle.

"That's the plan," Dean said, staring at the floor. He could just make out the faint gleam of the viscous oil against the brighter polish of the parquetry.

"Well, it's simple, have to say that for it," Rufus said disparagingly. "What happens if he's faster than you?"

"He won't be," Dean said, his voice clipped. Everything they'd done, everything they'd fought for would be wasted if Michael was, he knew. The archangel would have the vessel he wanted and the battle of Armageddon would commence as destiny had dictated.

Rufus looked at him, seeing the tension in the younger man's neck and jaw. No guarantees, he thought wryly. Odds were bad, considering it was an angel they were talking about. But then, the nature of the opponent had never bothered the man he stood next to.

"Alrighty then," he said, inhaling deeply. "Let's get this show on the road."

Dean shifted the duffel back beside the door and walked into the circle, closing his eyes. _Need some help here_, he whispered to himself. He shunted the thought aside and straightened up, thinking about the archangel, the last time he'd seen him, in Adam's body, the way the light had flooded everything, the sound of the angel's voice drilling deep into his mind.

_You hearing me, Michael?_

The silence in the room was complete, yet he felt something, like a deep sigh.

"Yes," he said aloud. "You win. Yes."

Seconds ticked by and the silence around them stretched and deepened. Dean could hear his heart, thudding against his ribcage, could hear the soft hiss of his breath, as it travelled in and out of his lungs, could hear the slight creak in his knee as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Light and sound came together in a blast wave, filling the room, piercing their minds. Rufus and Dean dropped to their knees, hands pressed tight over their ears, although the painful frequency wasn't so much heard as felt, oscillating through the bones and cavities of their skulls, and deeper, humming along the cells in their bodies. Eyes screwed shut, the light still penetrated, the pain of its brightness filling the hollow spaces in their heads, burning like fire along the exposed skin. Blood spattered on the bright parquetry floor as capillaries and veins swelled and began to leak.

From beside the chimney, Cas waited, feeling the blood trickling from his vessel's ears and the corners of Jimmy's eyes, ignoring it as he watched the circle with his angel's vision.

The noise ceased and the light faded and Adam, not quite Adam anymore, stood in the centre of the circle.

Dean shook his head and looked up as Cas strode to the circle and Rufus rolled over at the other end, feeling for his lighter and dropping the flame into the oil by touch.

Michael's hand snapped out and Dean threw himself backwards, feeling the fingers brush over his shoulder and close around the collar of his jacket. He pulled back hard, eeling his arms out, twisting around and dropping to roll across the flames as Michael stepped right to the edge, both breathing heavily at the closeness of the escape.

"Holding me here will only doom your world," Michael said slowly, looking at the circle surrounding him, eyes narrowing slightly as he saw Castiel standing on one side.

"Yeah, well, we'll see," Dean said, getting to his feet and looking at the archangel. "We can always let you out if Plan A fails."

"Plan A?" Michael said derisively. "You? Against Lucifer? With the Spear?"

"See you've been keeping up." Dean turned away and went to the duffel, drawing the wrapped bundle that held the two halves of the Spear.

"Lucifer will crush you, Spear or no Spear," Michael snapped.

"The Spear protects the bearer," Castiel said mildly. "You know that, Michael."

"It won't protect him." The archangel turned to look at the seraphim. "Not once he's toe to toe with him." He looked back at Dean. "You will be protected from his guards, from mishap and accident, but my brother will not stand there and let you stick that into him. He is an angel and you are just a mortal man!"

Ignoring the icy thread of doubt that trickled through him, Dean shrugged. "He'll be trapped."

"Like this?" Michael snorted derisively. "An arena to limit your options as well as his? Or do you think your brother can somehow gain the strength to wrestle control from his captor when he has failed to do so over all this time?" He inhaled deeply. "Or will you kill them both with the Spear, Dean? Can you do that? Kill your brother as well as mine for the good of the world and all who are left in it?"

Castiel looked across the circle of fire at the man, feeling his heart sink slightly as Dean's gaze cut away. It was the last resort, of course, if Sam couldn't fight Lucifer, couldn't get free. But seeing the doubt in his friend, he realised that Dean might not be able to do that either, at the very last.

"I didn't think so," Michael snarled, turning away. "Your worth was as my vessel, that's all. And even in that you are flawed – arrogant, stubborn, too filled with pride to save your world –"

"You wanna bandy semantics about pride?" Rufus cut in sourly as he climbed to his feet. "You should look to your own before you start blaming anyone else for what you've done."

"Silence, mortal!" Michael shouted, the deep, velvet baritone filling the room and shaking the walls. "I will not listen to the lies of a man."

"Not lies," Dean contradicted sharply, looking at him. "We wouldn't be here if someone on your team hadn't been arranging things to break Lucifer's cage."

Michael stared at him narrowly. "What are you talking about?"

"He's talking about the lines of Campbell and Winchester, Michael," Cas said quietly. "He's talking about the efforts that were made by Heaven to create two men to break the first and last seals. He's talking about conspiracy with Hell and angels working with demons and events manipulated to ensure the Lightbringer's release."

Michael spun around. "No."

"Yeah," Dean said. "So you better hope that I can kill your brother, because even when this is over, it's not over."

He walked from the room, carrying the wrapped bundle with him. Rufus glanced at Cas and followed him.

"What is he talking about?" Michael looked at Castiel.

"Raphael and Uriel, those two I'm certain of, probably others … there must be others," Castiel said wearily. "Someone gave the orders to join the lines of Araquiel and Azazel, Michael. Someone made sure that the brothers would be born. Would grow to manhood in a certain way. Trained. Versed in a life that would pit them against demonkind. Someone from Heaven."

"And you think I knew about this?"

Cas looked at him thoughtfully. "You are the commander of the Host, Michael. All Heaven is under your control. Are you saying that you didn't?"

The archangel twisted away, pacing around the circle. "Of course not! Release Lucifer? To what possible purpose? Who would be served by his release?"

"Raphael told us that angels who were with him were tired. They wanted Paradise."

"And they thought releasing the Morning Star would bring them that?"

"If you fought him, and cast him down again," Cas said. "It was thus written."

"That –" Michael shook his head. "That was a man's vision, not the will of Heaven!"

"That is what Raphael and the others hope for," the angel said with a shrug. "Humankind gone, peace on the Earth."

"They are wrong! There was never any plan to –" Michael cut himself off abruptly, stopping to look at Cas. "And you are wrong. About this plan, this attempt – Lucifer will kill him. Is that what you would have happen to the man you call your friend, Castiel?"

Cas looked away. "He has surprised me, he may surprise you."

He walked to the door, glancing back as he reached it. "Someone will be here to release you, when it is over."

* * *

_**Morning Star Baptist Church, East Atlanta**_

Boze sat in the cab of the truck, parked a little back from Gibson Street, staring up the road at the small brick and tile church that was less than a block from him.

"This is a hellgate?" he asked Sean disbelievingly. "Looks like my mamma's church in Akron."

Sean glanced past him and shrugged. "Not many regular churches have got bodyguards like that," he said, gesturing at the group standing on the pavement across from the church. All carried automatic weapons, and while they were too far away to see them, both men knew that all would have black eyes, corner to corner.

"Think the devil started getting antsy?"

"Looks like," Sean said. He glanced back over his shoulder. Their main force was a suburb away, parked under the leafy canopy on the other side of the freeway. "How many to clear the area?"

"What's the headcount?"

"Sixty outside, no idea what's inside."

"We'll bring eight of the tankers, two down each street. Flank 'em with a hundred on the ground. We can't afford to let one of those bastards get away and warn the boss."

Sean nodded, picking up the mike from the radio under the dash.

Boze listened to the other man call in the orders quietly, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he stared down the quiet street. He would've preferred to wait for Emmett and Franklin to get here, but he couldn't. They had to take the gate and hold it. They couldn't risk it being opened, letting more of the hellspawn onto this plane.

He looked around as he heard the deep rumble of diesel engines coming from the north.

"What the hell –" Straightening in the seat, he leaned out the window. Coming up the street were buses, dozens of them. His brows drew together tightly as he saw that they were filled with people.

"Sean, get everyone here, now," he said to the hunter sharply. "We're out of time."

* * *

The first bus pulled up in front of the little church, the doors opening and the people filling it pushed out onto the sidewalk. Several demons emerged from the dim interior of the building through the double doors, coming down the long ramp and harrying the civilians up and back inside.

Boze watched them anxiously. Sixty-odd, he noted, mostly women and kids, all of them hunched up and frightened-looking. He heard the deeper growl of the tankers, approaching along the side streets, under the rumble of the bus engines, and breathed a sigh of relief, turning to Sean.

"As soon as they're in range, tell 'em to hit the buses hard with the water and block them off," he said quickly. "They'll use the civilians as shields if we give them –"

The volley of gunfire was sudden and shocking, coming from the interior of the church. Boze's head snapped around, seeing the second busload of people freezing on the sidewalk in front of the ramp, trying to back away, turning to run or get back on the bus, and every demon on the street brought up a weapon, the guns chattering as they mowed down several on the church's lawn, bright red blood vivid as it pooled across the grass.

The hunter shoved the tanker into gear, his face stony as he swung out of the cross-street, past the waiting line of buses, heading for the side of the church. The heavy vehicle lurched to one side as he hit the brakes, driving it up onto the grassy verge next to the ramp, hitting the switch for the compressor as he swung out of the cab. The M16 stock was hard against his shoulder and he fired at the demons who were being knocked off their feet by the high-pressure hoses from the top of the tanker, the steady shots hitting them one by one.

* * *

From each of the cross-streets in the straight-grid neighbourhood, tankers and Army trucks rumbled into the street, followed by hundreds of people on foot, blocking off the buses, hoses pumping streams of holy water, angry, hard faces lit by muzzle flashes, the thunder of automatic fire and screams filling the air.

Jocelyn dropped from her truck, racing to the rear of the bus and firing a single shot into the lock of the rear emergency exit. She yanked at the door, lifting it clear and yelling to the passengers to come out. Behind her, Gary picked off a demon who ran around the corner of the bus, the meatsuit it was wearing dropping to the ground as the binding sigil trapped the demon inside.

* * *

Sue screamed, staggering backwards along the roof of the tanker, the hose lifting high into the air as four deep slashes appeared across her abdomen, her jacket and shirt in pieces, her blood staining the edges. Miles caught her hand before she fell, snatching the hose from her fingers as he pushed her down beneath him and turned the hose on the demon standing and grinning on the porch of the house next to them. The water knocked it off its feet, and Tom fired, a dozen bullets stitched across its chest as it struggled to rise, leaving a line of dark holes.

"Hu-ah!" the man shouted, swinging the barrel to take another as it came from the cross-street. "Bring it on!"

* * *

The thud of running feet drowned out even the gunfire as the army of the camps came down the streets, racing toward the church and buses. At the church ramp, Boze fought his way up against the demons blocking the way, held pinned to the brick walls by the steady pressure of the holy water, or down on the ground, locked into the bodies of the possessed, dozens of black holes leaking red onto the concrete, diluted and washed away even as it ran out of them.

The bomb was in his hand as he crossed the threshold, tucking and rolling fast inside, the slender bottle rising in the air, fuse flaring brightly. It exploded and he rolled to one side, arm thrown over his face. When he came to his feet, there was no more movement in the church, just the pile of bodies in front of the altar and dozens of black shadows burned into the walls and the stained glass windows.

He looked around the interior and saw it, a flickering reddish light coming from the entrance in the floor to one of the altar. _How far did the gate reach for blood_, he wondered? People were dying, outside, down the street … perhaps not the thousands that Lucifer wanted to sacrifice here but still enough to have cracked the seal on the damned thing.

Walking to the window nearest the trapdoor, he reversed his gun and smashed through it, waving at Sean.

"Need the water in here, fast!" he yelled, stepping back as Sean turned the hose around and the hose pumped its load in through the broken window and over the floor, the holy water running down into the hole. The light paled further.

_Need Gideon_, he suddenly thought.

* * *

_**Interchange I-85, I-75, Atlanta**_

The two long convoys stopped at the interchange, and Emmett leaned out of his window to look at Franklin.

"How many you got?"

"Something over fifteen hundred, I think," Franklin shouted back, over the noise of the engine. "Sean got through – they're at the gate and they need reinforcements."

Emmett nodded. "We'll take the gate, get the civilians over to the stadium."

"You're not taking them?"

"Gate needs blood to open, best if there aren't too many dying around it."

Franklin shifted into gear, pulling out and taking the exit to the right, the sign above it directing the off-flow to Atlanta's downtown business district and the Field of Gold sporting stadium.

* * *

_**Brookhaven, Atlanta**_

"Keep him busy," Rufus said softly, as they dropped to the base of the high stone perimeter wall. "We'll go around."

Dean nodded, unwrapping the slender haft of the Spear and fitting the two ends together, twisting and pushing and hearing the faint tock of the locking mechanism within the haft. Michael's words rang around in his head and he pushed them away with an effort. All he had to do was to get the sonofabitch into the circle and Sam would have a chance, he told himself.

_The garden_. It led straight to the hall. It would be where the devil would be. The odd sense of certainty made him shiver. He walked around the house, keeping to the shadows of the trees. On this side of the house, the shadows lay long from the high walls, and the air seemed murky, the shapes of the trees and shrubs indistinct and uncertain.

He stopped at the edge of the tree-line when the gardens drew back, opening into a wide stretch of emerald-green lawn. A gazebo stood close to the house, almost invisible under its heavy burden of rampant foliage, and he saw the line of glass-paned doors, the stone terrace with its shallow, wide steps leading up to them.

Nothing moved in the sunlit space. He couldn't hear anything, not a bird or insect, no voice or sound penetrated the deep silence of the garden. He should have been able to hear something, he thought nervously, looking around again, his gaze scanning the woods that curved to his left, the windows of the house in front of him.

There was nothing. It was empty. He took a step out of the shadows, and felt the sunlight on his face. Another step took him onto the smooth green grass.

"You made it."

The voice was behind and to one side of him and he spun around. There was no one there.

"Not going to be so easy, is it, Dean?"

Turning fast, the Spear whistling high as he raised it, he saw him – Sam – _not Sam_ – Lucifer – the devil … standing in the middle of the lawn, tall, broad-shouldered frame in a crisp, perfectly-tailored, white suit, smiling at him.

"The Spear of Destiny," he continued, looking at it. "You want to know who put out the rumours that it was the only thing that could kill me, Dean? Me." He laughed at the way the man's face hardened. "Seemed like a good move at the time, I mean, look at it, you could hardly kill a bunny with that little thing."

_Bluffing_, Dean told himself firmly. _B'rer Rabbit in a white suit_.

"In that case, you don't have anything to worry about, do you?" he said, relieved that his voice was steady.

"Oh, I've got plenty to worry about," Lucifer said. "And so do you. Michael's going to be here pretty soon, and when he sees you, he'll be wearing you so fast your head'll spin."

Dean walked toward him slowly, the Spear's tip extended. He watched his brother's – _not Sam!_ – face, seeing the faintest movement of the muscle under his eye as he got closer. The tells were the same, even though the personality, the timbre and syntax of the voice were not. Lucifer moved more sinuously than Sam had, more relaxed in the vessel than its soul had been. But his expressions, the way he used the body, they were ingrained with years and years of Sam and they wouldn't disappear so quickly.

"Not if I ram this through your heart first," Dean suggested.

"And kill Sam?" Lucifer smiled. "I don't think you can, Dean."

He shifted his feet a little further back as Dean got closer, smiling again. "You've been difficult to keep track of."

_Change the subject as much as you like_, Dean thought. _You're going nowhere but down._

"I told your brother I wasn't going to kill you, wasn't going to hurt you," Lucifer continued, taking another step back. "But everything you've been up to over the last couple of years, well … it was a deal-breaker, I'm afraid. You can understand that."

From the corner of his eye, as he kept his gaze on the devil, he saw a movement beyond the glass doors and felt a tiny loosening of the tension that was making his neck ache. They were in.

"Sam didn't tell you I wouldn't be hiding out and sitting around while you destroyed the world?"

Lucifer snorted as he turned and walked up the terrace steps. "I didn't destroy the world, Dean. I've just been … pruning the weeds."

Dean stopped at the bottom of the steps, watching the angel as he opened the door to the hall. His alarms were going off but he couldn't see a reason for it. He followed Lucifer across the terrace and through the door.

The hall was curiously shadowed, considering the sunlight coming in through the doors to the north. Dean slowed as his eyes adjusted to the contrast between the brightly lit squares on the white floor and the reflecting columns beyond the glass doors, and the shadows that seemed to fill the other side of the long room, thickening under the high, vaulted ceiling.

"You shouldn't have come, Dean," Lucifer said softly, turning around to face him.

"You don't have as much as control over Sam as you thought," Dean countered, stepping out of the light and lifting the Spear head.

"That all changes now," Lucifer said, his agreement unspoken but there. "Watching you die will be the last thing Sam sees before I lock him down forever."

Dean backed into the open room, moving between the columns. "What are you waiting for?"

Lucifer followed him across the room. "I was surprised by Sam's feelings about you, Dean."

"Yeah?" Dean felt his foot slide fractionally along the floor, careful to lift his boot up higher as he took another step back.

"All that blustering about the great brotherly bond you two have," Lucifer said slowly. "And it turns out that it's not such a great feeling after all. I mean, I understand sibling rivalry, some of the things I've said to my brothers – but Sammy, he takes what you tell him hard."

Dean stopped moving and looked at him.

"Telling him he was a monster, for instance," Lucifer said, walking closer. "I don't think he's ever going to get that out of his head, Dean. Especially now."

Dean swallowed, shunting aside the memory as it rose. "Once he's free of you, we'll figure that out."

Lucifer laughed, the sound echoing from the walls. "God, you're priceless."

He twisted aside as Dean lunged forward with the Spear. The doors to either end of the hall burst open and Rufus and Castiel ran toward the circle. Dropping suddenly under the next swing, one long leg scything out and catching Dean's ankle as he was stepping back, the archangel sent him crashing to the floor.

Lucifer swung around, rising to his feet and staring at the angel who slowed as he came up to the edge of the circle. "Castiel, a rebel after my own heart."

He snapped his fingers and the angel disintegrated. On the other side of the circle, Rufus dropped his lighter into the oil and the flames ran around the line. Lucifer lifted his arms and a roaring, rushing sound filled the air. Dean was on his feet, swinging the Spear as demons dropped from the shadows of the high ceiling, the first one he touched turning to dust.

He could hear Rufus screaming as more came at him, caught a glimpse in his periphery of black, leathery bodies dropping over the flames on the other side of the circle, of Lucifer striding out over them. He was surrounded by swirling dust and ash, demon after demon suiciding on the edges of the Spear as he swung it around, trying to get clear. The last one imploded at his feet as the door at the end of the hall slammed behind the fallen angel.

Rufus lay on the edge of the still-burning circle, the flames reflecting on the sheen of sweat that covered his face. Dean dropped beside him, looking at the long incisions cutting through clothing and skin and the muscle underneath, from ribs to pelvis. The hunter's hands were pressing hard against them.

"Get … after … him," Rufus said furiously as he dragged in mouthfuls of air. "I'll be fine."

The demon lay a foot away from him, the knife still embedded in its chest. Reaching over, Dean pulled it free and gave it back to Rufus.

"Hang on, okay?" he said tightly. Rufus nodded, fingers closing around the bone hilt of the knife.

"Jus' … kill … the … sonofabitch."

Dean nodded and got to his feet, running for the door the angel had gone through. _Gate or stadium_, he wondered briefly. _Stadium_. He'd be looking for Michael.

* * *

_**Morning Star Baptist Church, East Atlanta**_

Maggie pulled up four blocks from the church. It was the closest she could get.

"Holy crap," she breathed, staring at the fighting, at the bodies strewn over the asphalt streets and grass lawns of the modest homes, at the tankers that shone, bright red in the early sunshine, rainbows surrounding them as the hoses pumped and filled the air with a fine, pearly mist.

"The gate is in the church?" Pastor Gideon looked down the length of the street at the small church just visible on the corner.

"That's what Boze said," Maggie answered, pushing her door open. "C'mon, we'll try and get around this."

He followed her along the sidewalk, stepping over black-eyed, writhing men and women, trapped in the vessels they'd taken as those vessels lay dying. The barrel of his shotgun rose automatically when a fight swung close to them, the booms of the gun drowned out by the shrieks of the demons as the salt-and-iron filled shells hit them, driving their loads in deep.

"This way," Maggie snapped, reaching out to pull him to one side, her gun swinging around and sending a spray of bullets into the three demons that ran toward them. The first two dropped instantly, the third kept coming and Gideon added a double-barrelled load into it, its face ripped apart by the shot, mouth falling open as it toppled backwards.

"Should I be exorcising these?" he asked as he stumbled through the narrow lych-gate into the rear garden.

"Sigils'll keep them in the meatsuits," Maggie told him, her hand locked around his wrist and dragging him forward. "When the bodies are burned, they're still forced to remain in the ashes. They can't do anyone any further harm."

She rapped hard on the back door and pushed Gideon inside ahead of her as Boze opened it, swinging it wide for them.

"We have to hurry," he told them, slamming and bolting the door behind them, pushing the salt line back across the threshold. "Word got out somehow that we got a priest here to seal it up for good and someone's been sending reinforcements."

"You know there's nothing in the Bible about sealing the gates of Hell, don't you?" Gideon asked as he followed the two hunters through the vestry and into the church.

"This one hasn't been opened yet, Pastor," Boze said, glancing back over his shoulder. "Figure if you bless it and ask God for help, it'll work."

"You figure?"

Boze grinned at the disbelief in the man's voice. "Hell, padre, we're _always_ just making it up as we go along."

Gideon gave him a dour look as he stopped at the trapdoor in the floor. "Down there?"

The light emerging was a wash of gold, tinged with pink. It pulsed like something living, and he felt a frisson of fear spread through his organs, taking the strength from his legs.

"'Fraid so," Boze nodded, looking at Maggie. "Watch his back, I'll make sure nothing gets through up here."

She nodded, reloading the magazine in her rifle and checking the mag in the automatic.

"Do you need anything, David?"

Gideon shook his head. He had his Bible and a flask of holy water, refilled from the blessed reservoir. He had a kitchen container of salt, similarly blessed. The laws of Hell, as he understood them, had been largely confined to the catechisms of the Church, mankind's beliefs feeding and controlling the seething pit of evil in a way he couldn't really understand, but had no doubts about. _What I have created, I can also destroy_, he told himself firmly.

Maggie stepped down onto the narrow wooden steps that led into the basement of the church, flicking a glance behind her. Gideon met her eyes and nodded and she turned away and climbed down.

If it hadn't been for the light and the creaking of the foundations of the floor, it would've looked like any ordinary basement, he thought, stepping onto the smooth concrete at the foot of the steps.

But it wasn't any ordinary basement. He could see the edges, outlined in that disturbingly throbbing light, could hear the earth straining underneath his feet and the not-heard whispers brushing against his mind of the demons that stood on the other side, pushing hard against the fabric of this plane.

Without forethought or volition, he found himself murmuring the Lord's Prayer as he approached the gate, the words strengthening a little in volume with each step. To his surprise, he heard Maggie's voice beside him, stumbling a little over the words here and there, her voice thin and ragged as she watched the shadows around them, her gaze reluctant to settle on the floor.

"Thy kingdom come, Thy Will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven."

He knelt in front of the glowing light and pulled out the salt, removing the top and pouring the crystals along the edges he could see. From underneath, there was a massive percussion, the floor lifting and falling. Gideon put his hand down to steady himself as Maggie staggered to one side. The floor was hot under his fingers and he swallowed, finishing the line with the last of the salt.

"And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

Maggie's voice strengthened a little and he glanced at her. She was looking around the room, her gaze scanning and scrutinising every shadow, the rifle gripped tightly in her hands.

"For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen."

Again the floor boomed beneath them, and he closed his eyes. "Lord God Almighty, give me the strength to seal this gate of evil forever."

He pulled the flask from his jacket, and unscrewed the lid, sprinkling the water over the surface. A deep groaning and grinding filled the basement. _Pay it no mind_, he told himself forcefully, holding the vision behind his eyes of a power flowing through him.

"I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore and I have the keys of hell and of death."

Maggie's gasp forced his eyes open and he fell back as concrete stretched and rose in front of him, thinning out as the visage pushing under it lifted higher, pulled taut over brow and nose and jaw and smooth, long skull.

"With these keys I do so lock this gate of Hell, in this time and for all time," Gideon shouted, getting to his feet and sprinkling the water over the floor again.

The roaring deepened, reverberating through their feet and in their teeth as the creature pushing against the fabric of the world opened its mouth in fury.

"This body is the servant of God, this soul is the servant of God, and all that is done in His name shall be everlasting for His is the power, to make right against the abomination and the harlot and the demon and even so the angel, fallen to Earth," Gideon bellowed, lifting the Bible in one hand above the gate and the rosary against the flask in the other.

"In the name of the Father. I seal this gate!" he yelled, sweat pouring from his face and down his back, a sharp, stabbing pain in his left arm as he stared down at the face in the floor, watching it turn from side to side.

"In the name of the Son. I seal this gate!" he shouted, lowering the book and necklace together, ignoring the pressure that was filling his chest. The face lunged out at him and he bared his teeth at it, leaning forward as he swung his hands from left to right in front of him.

"In the name of the Holy Ghost. I SEAL THIS GATE!" Gideon screamed the words, darkness clouding the edge of his vision, no air to breathe, no strength in his body. The book was shining brighter and brighter in his hand and the cross on the rosary flashed out with a searing argentine light. It burned him and his fingers released them, both falling onto the concrete.

* * *

Maggie felt herself thrown back into the wall near the trapdoor steps with the concussive force of the explosion as Bible and rosary touched the floor. She fell to the ground and looked up. The room was quiet and still. Pastor Gideon lay on his back, his hands blackened and crisped where they'd gripped the book and the rosary, the flask lying a foot away. She rolled to her knees, wincing at the throbbing ache at the back of her head, and crawled to him.

His eyes were open, staring blankly ahead. The irises and pupils were gone, the eyeballs white and unmarked across the sockets. She lifted her hand, fingertips pressed lightly against the carotid artery at the side of his neck. No pulse beat there. There was no rise and fall to his chest.

Looking where the gate had been, there was nothing to see there now. The floor was concrete, unremarkable, smooth and unmarked.

* * *

"How many more?" Boze looked around the streets. The bodies of the possessed were burning in the front yard of the house across the street from the church. They'd counted a hundred and thirty here, and on the buses.

"That's it," Emmett said, rubbing a hand tiredly over his face. "As soon as the gate was sealed, the rest turned and headed south and west."

"For the stadium?"

"Guess so," the hunter said, shrugging. "We better get over there."

"Yeah," Boze agreed, glancing at Maggie.

He'd heard the roaring and felt the booming percussion of the demon that had tried to break through, had seen the light, pure and silver and not at all of this world, fill the square trapdoor entrance and spread through the church. He'd been fighting four demons at the time and they'd all been vaporised by the touch of that light, disappearing in front of him. Maggie had staggered out a moment later. When he and Sean had gone down to get the pastor's body, they'd seen nothing to indicate that a gate had ever been there.

Emmett jerked his head back at the church. "You gonna leave the padre in there?"

Boze followed his gaze and nodded. "He died there, closing that gate. The church needs his protection."

"How many did we lose?" Maggie straightened up from the side of the truck and looked at them.

"A hundred and ten," Boze said stiffly, gesturing the pyres that were burning two blocks down Gibson Street. "Demons poured in when you were down with the gate. Too many here who froze up or had no defences."

She nodded. It wasn't just the physical harm the demons could do. Some people had secrets they'd tried to keep, even from themselves. And most demons could ferret out that kind of weakness in a heartbeat.

"Saddle 'em up, Emmett," Boze said, gesturing to Maggie to get in the cab ahead of him. "We're leaving."

* * *

_**East Tawas, Michigan**_

The morning sunshine poured across the porch, and Alex closed her eyes against it, smiling a little as she listened to the children's voices, raised as they sang the anthem, coming through the open windows of the little schoolhouse. The overnight rain had left the deep, vibrant scent of wet earth, and it was a pleasant contrast to the clean scents of the growing trees.

"You looked content," Ellen said, holding a cup of coffee and sitting down on the top step next to her.

She opened her eyes and shrugged. "Not content, not yet, but getting there, I guess."

"Jerome said they've gone in past the wardings," Ellen said, sipping the coffee. "He can't see them anymore."

"A few days?"

"At most," Ellen confirmed with a sigh. "How are we doing here?"

"Good," Alex said, putting her empty cup beside her. "The way everything's been growing …" She gestured at the trees growing in between the house and cabins, already over twelve feet high. "I think, if we have enough people at harvest, it'll last everyone through the winter easily." She glanced at the older woman. "I heard wolf music last night."

Ellen smiled. "Jo said that she saw a deer, white-tail, down at the other end of Tawas Lake two mornings ago." She shrugged. "A third of everything was supposed to have been left – the wilderness areas. Perhaps they're coming down from Canada?"

"Perhaps." She looked up at the distant noise, frowning as she took in the familiarity of it.

Recognition dawned at the same as realisation and for a split second, she and Ellen stared at each other in horror.

"I'll get the children," Alex said, bolting upright and jumping down the steps. Ellen rose and spun around, racing for the front door. Just inside the door frame, the large red button was inside a glass case. She flipped the lid up and hit the button with her palm, the klaxon alarms hooting through the house and compound. In the other camps, the alarms would be sounding as well. Since Baal's attack, the alarms had been installed across all five camps and in the half-finished defended walls of the western side of the town.

Bobby ran out of the office, looking around wildly.

"Planes!" Ellen shouted at him, heading for the stairs. "Goddamned planes!"

"Ellen! NO!"

The side of the house exploded when she was halfway up, and the stairs disappeared from beneath her feet as she was thrown sideways into the wall like a rag doll. Thunder and lightning, she thought, confusedly. _I'm falling a long way_. There was a bright, sharp stab in her side and she hit the floor, feeling it buckle up under her, sliding downward fast again.

* * *

A hand gripped her shoulder and she looked up, seeing Bobby's mouth moving but no sound coming out. Inside her leg, fire burned and she looked down again, watching blood spreading over the side of her jeans.

"Musta broke something," she muttered, but she couldn't hear that either, not with her ears, only in her head. She felt Bobby's strength pull her to her feet, pulling her arm around his shoulder and she hobbled alongside him. The second explosion was soundless but the glass in all the windows blew in and the man holding her pushed her against the wall, his head down beside hers and arms around her as the glittering fall seem to fly at them in slow motion.

* * *

Alex reached the door of the school room as the formation flew overhead, the shriek of the engines deafening against the quiet of lake and forest.

"Under the tables!" she screamed and the last word was wiped out by the explosion that hit the corner of the big house. She had a glimpse of Russ' face, eyes wide as his arms swept some of the children under the long teacher's table. She saw the walls shudder and heard a crack in the timbers of the roof. Then the second explosion filled the world with light and sound and movement, all of it extinguished as her head hit the floor.

* * *

Jo saw the planes, black dots against the pale blue sky and felt her heart drop.

"What?" Ty eased himself upright in the bed, looking at her face worriedly.

"Planes," she told him shortly. "Get everyone down into the basement tunnel."

"Wait! Where're you going?" He swung his feet from the bed to the floor and stumbled slowly after her, holding his ribs and stomach as he forced himself to move faster. She didn't answer him and she was gone by the time he'd reached the door. He knew anyway. Swearing under his breath, he staggered down the hall, shouting at the top of his voice to anyone around to get downstairs.

* * *

Jo shot down the hall and turned at the end, racing up the narrow flight of stairs that led to the lookout tower on the corner of the building. Franklin had set up one of the anti-aircraft guns there, a Cold War M45 Quadmount, four barrels, two over, two under, and she ran to it, mouth thinned as she forced herself to slow down enough to remember exactly what she had to do. It was loaded, the boxes in their places. The dots weren't dots any more, clearly defined, they were approaching at speed. She swung the heavy barrels up and stared through the scope, dragging in deep breaths and letting them out to loosen the tension in her shoulders and back. _Slow is smooth and smooth is fast_. The mantra of the ex-soldier was quiet and calm in her head. Max range was a kilometre and they were coming to that … now.

Seamus climbed up behind her as she fired, crouched beside the gun, under its turntable. The gun fired four hundred rounds per minute, but most were wasted as the rate was too slow to engage the fighters as they flew over.

"Out," Jo yelled, watching the bombs dropping, two planes per camp. She forced back her fear and grief as she watched the explosions rip through South West and Chitaqua, hearing the rapid booming of the cannon on Lookout Hill and watching the planes bank as they came around for their second run. One exploded mid-air as Lookout's gun found its target, the double-explosion of the payload it was carrying and its own fuel spitting out shrapnel over Lake Tawas. Seamus unloaded the big tombstone-shaped canisters and shoved the next ones on, and Jo narrowed her concentration down to the four planes within her range, leaving the others for Tim on Lookout.

* * *

"Alex!" Russ' face was above hers, grimy and streaked with blood. She frowned at him for a moment, then memory returned. Trying to move, she stopped as something pricked at her back, stabbing her as she drew in a breath.

The equally grime-covered faces of the children peered from behind him. "Get them out," she said, swallowing quickly as her throat tickled with the dust coating her, not wanting to cough. "Bright colours off, roll in the mud, get darker, under the trees."

He nodded, and looked at the eighteen-inch beam that was lying through the school room and on top of her. It seemed to be a corner post from the house, but he couldn't be sure. The remains of the small desk was over her, two legs intact, the other two broken, the tight triangle left holding the weight off, but trapping her.

"I'll get you out –" he said, moving to the end of the beam and wrapping his arms around it. It didn't move.

"No," she said. "No time, get them out now. Get deep – into the forest – under the trees – attacking the buildings – go – now!"

The stabbing sensation felt deeper and she felt something trickle from the corner of her mouth and down the side of her chin. From the horrified look on the teacher's face, she thought it was probably blood. In the distance she heard the whistling scream of the fighters, banking, she thought, to come around again.

"Now!"

He nodded unwillingly, hearing them too, and turned, leading the children out through the room that had been Father Michael's and under the cover of the fast-growing conifers and deciduous trees that filled the spaces between the cabins. Another month and the cabins would've been hidden under the canopies, he thought bitterly.

"Prudence, Mikey, Rosie, rub the mud on your shirts," he whispered as they moved away from the camp, away from the buildings. "You too, Robby. And Madeline."

The children dropped to the ground, covering each other with the damp, black soil and rubbing it in, the bright colours of their clothing disappearing into a patchwork of grey and black, muted enough to hide them under the cover of the trees.

* * *

_**Field of Gold Stadium, Atlanta**_

The Impala growled as Dean apexed the corner to the underpass, hands light on the wheel and stick. _Ten miles to the church, thirteen or thereabouts to the stadium_. In his mind, the map of the city and the surrounding suburbs lay clearly and he made the tight left onto the four-lane road that led to the interchange and downtown without thinking about it. His fingers reached out for the stereo, stiffly jabbing the tape into the deck. He twisted the knob as far to the right as it would go and the scratchy, raw voice of Bon Scott filled the car as he pushed down on the accelerator.

Cas was gone. And he'd left Rufus dying on the floor. And he couldn't let those thoughts in right now, couldn't let them eat at him. _You've got one shot at this now. Just once chance to undo what you've done_.

He took the left under the interchange and gunned the engine, hearing noise above the car's rumble, as the signs for the university campus became more prevalent.

Stamping of feet. Thunder of vehicles. The glow of white light above the stadium stands.

If Emmett had gotten there in time, there should be a circle in the centre of the field, he thought. At the end of the gravelled drive, a white car had been left, engine running, parked askew in front of the stadium.

Pulling up beside it, Dean killed the engine. He slid out, snatching the Spear from the seat beside him. People filled the grounds, turning and parting as they saw him approach, jostling and pushing back against each other to clear a space wide enough for him to move through. The marching thud of thousands of feet still sounded in the streets, multiple echoes resounding from the high walls of the stands and buildings. He glimpsed men and women, all carrying weapons, converging from the side-streets into the narrow park that held the sports field.

Dean slowed to a walk as the press of the crowd shifted to let him pass. The stands had been built for the college ball fans, designed to hold perhaps five thousand people. From one end to the other, they were filled with the incandescent vessels of the Host. Outnumbering the angels, he saw people, his people, thousands of them, their faces hard and cold as they stared across the playing field toward the angels on one side and the much smaller mass of demon-possessed at the head of the field, their hands holding weapons at the ready.

Lucifer stood at the centre of the field, head thrown back and eyes closed. Dean saw Emmett and Max, standing on opposite sides of the green. The circle would be between them, he thought suddenly, seeing Max's head incline slightly as he walked toward the devil.

And still the grounds and the streets were filling. He could hear them. Could feel them. The noise and movement ceased abruptly when he stepped onto the grass, crossing the hundred-yard line.

Lucifer's head lowered, his brother's eyes hooded as they stared at him.

"Where is Michael?"

"Not available right now," Dean said, lifting the Spear as he crossed the eighty-yard line. "Kind of light on the backup."

The demons at the end of the field were surrounded. Angels on one side, humans on the other.

"That won't matter," Lucifer told him coldly. "All anyone here'll see is a human. Dying."

He lifted his fist in the air and closed it abruptly. Dean felt a shiver pass through him, but nothing else and he smiled humourlessly as the archangel's eyes narrowed at him.

"Guess the Spear is strong enough to protect me from angel magic," he said lightly, crossing the seventy-yard line, his voice clear and deep in the complete silence that filled the field.

Lucifer glanced over his shoulder. "Fool me once, Dean, shame on you … but there's no fooling me twice."

Dean stiffened as the angel's arms snapped out to either side and Emmett and Max dropped to the ground, the cracks of their necks heard around the stadium. The human army surged forward and the devil laughed, a long, mocking laugh that rang around the open space, overriding the angry murmur from the crowd of humans, the raucous catcalls from the demons and the sibilant rustle of wings from the stands.

"Come on, plenty for everyone!" he shouted at them.

Dean stepped forward, his expression tight and his eyes dark. "Gate's been sealed. Michael isn't coming," he said hoarsely, gesturing to the people to keep back. "You wanted to kill me, here I am, ready and waiting!"

* * *

Inside the meshed lattice of his prison, Sam stared out, seeing his brother adjust his stance through the double-vision of human and angelic perceptions. The fallen angel controlling his body could see through flesh and blood, could see the waxing and waning of the energy levels in the human facing him, the coronial flare of the energy field that surrounded him, in shades of midnight and silver and rose.

Lucifer knew about the trap. Knew about the Spear. He couldn't move, couldn't fight until the trap had broken the link from the angel's connection to the power of the souls in Hell. He'd almost caught him, in the house, in the hall, but he hadn't seen the strategy, hadn't heard the call to the demons. He'd heard their wailing as they'd thrown themselves over the flames. But not the angel's mind.

The strength against him was enormous. Crushing. He'd shown his hand and the creature had doubled the walls, doubled the chains, pounded against him until he could barely remain himself, awash in excruciating agony, holding onto the shredded remnants of his soul with fingers torn down to the bone. There was a second chance. But it was receding. And he couldn't warn Dean. Couldn't tell him that the devil knew about it. Knew it all.

* * *

Dean waited for him warily, every thought banished and locked away, every sense engaged, stretched out, alert. _You are just a mortal man_. Michael's words had been burned deep into him, and he watched his brother's face for the tells, for the faintest telegraphing twitches to tell him what the devil would do and how and when and why.

He had the blurred impression of speed, a rush toward him and he twisted aside, raising the point of the Spear and slicing in the direction his senses told him was the right one. His hands registered the touch along the thin haft of the weapon, a slight shudder against them as the tip tore through the shoulder of the white suit, a flash of deeper power as it slid through skin and touched blood. Dropping and rolling fast, he felt the strike he hadn't seen graze past his cheekbone, tearing the skin off even with the lightness of the glancing blow. But he was just a mortal man, and the next blow struck him above the brow, jarring down to the bone, a hairline fracture opening up under its power. He fell forward, driven down, and felt his knuckles hit the grass, heard the collective indrawn breath of the armies surrounding the field. _Look out for the foot_, he thought dazedly, throwing his weight to the side, too late, the toe of the narrow shoes striking his ribs, the weight behind it driving the point in between the bones, splitting apart the cartilage with an explosion of pain that paralysed his nervous system.

_Get up, get up_, he told himself, getting a hand and knee under him, feeling for the slender length of the Spear. Hands bunched in the front of his jacket, and hauled him to his feet and there wasn't time to even look up before the fist drew back and swung into him again, this time midway along the jaw, the crack of the bone loud as his head snapped back with the force. It was like being hit by a tree … or a train … the thought came and went in the miasma of light and shadow and movement and noise that was all he could register.

"You were always the weak one, Dean," Lucifer whispered against his ear as he pulled him close again. "Always the one who looked to others – your father, the old drunk, even the angel – to tell you what you to do."

The words penetrated slowly, and he looked into his brother's face. "Sam …"

"Sam can't hear you," Lucifer snarled, staring at him. "Sam is locked up tight."

"Sam, you in there?"

The cheekbone shattered and he felt his mouth fill with blood, letting his head fall to the side as he tried to spit it out.

"You know, when your brother said yes, I could feel his relief," the angel said, lifting him off his feet and taking his weight in one hand. "No more Dean. No more guilt or fear or anger. Just the two of us, as we were supposed to be."

Dean felt his eye swelling shut and he rolled the other one, looking down at the ground. They were over the fifty-yard line. He coughed as his feet hit the ground again, sending a fine bloody spray over the white suit in front of him.

"Sam, I'm here, man," he said, looking into the hazel eyes above him. "Here."

"Not for much longer." Lucifer slammed his fist into the man's torso and felt the muscle split under his knuckles, the organs beneath crushed with the blow. Dean sagged as the pain hit, his eye rolling up to show the white, his face draining of blood, paper-white, the freckles standing out.

_Stay._

He didn't know where the thought came from, but he found something to help push back against the fiery acid that was eating him from the inside out, something to keep a hold of consciousness. His head snapped back again as the angel's fist hit his nose, splitting the skin and breaking it, forcing him to drag in a breath through his mouth. Mists were gathering around him and he felt cold, the sunlight on his skin no longer warm.

He was dropped and he felt the grass, comforting under his cheek, every part of him hurting, hearing Lucifer's footfalls move away from him. He could smell it. That pungent scent that reminded him of museums. Of mausoleums. Of age and death and the desert.

_Move your hand._

He forced his hand across the blades of grass, grateful for the uniform length. Muscle protested as he made his arm lift. Pain raced along his nerves, igniting with every junction. His hand slid inside the pocket and he curled his fingers slowly around the object that rested there.

* * *

Sam looked down at his brother. The energy web that surrounded him was dimming, the colours changing, darkening, reddening with the pain he could see through the angel's eyes. Lucifer turned away and looked at the crowd surrounding him. Sam felt the blaze of his triumph. The Spear lay on the grass, a few feet from Dean but it might as well have been a thousand miles distant for all the good it could do him.

* * *

Dean pulled his hand free, teeth clenched against the shuddering reaction that brought. Pushing his hand back across the grass was easier than pulling it had been. He looked at the closed lid hopelessly for a second, his thumb twisted to one side and unable push it back. Turning it over, he dragged it against the grass and it opened. _Have to run the wheel_, he thought distantly. He wasn't sure he could.

_You can._

Bracing the smooth, metal container against the earth, he stared at the wheel. His thumb rested over it. _Just pull back_.

He did. The wheel ran and the spark from the flint caught the wick. The flame danced. He pushed the lighter over and watched the fire race around the circle.

"NO!"


	22. Chapter 22 A Cost for All Things

**Chapter 22 A Cost for All Things**

* * *

_**Brookhaven, Atlanta**_

_There was a room, off the long hall. It was circular and there was a design on the floor, circles within circles. A lot of them. A man stood in one of them, tall and thin, wearing a black suit. He was … almost transparent … _

The memory of Alex's voice filled Rufus' mind and he frowned slightly, wondering why that memory would return when he was lying on the floor of the devil's house with his blood running out of him. _A man. Trapped in circles. In this house_, he thought disjointedly. _A man_.

He looked down the length of the hall, past the flames that still flickered next to him. There were doors, down near the end.

_One more thing, then_, he said to himself. _Just one more thing and you can rest_.

He reached forward with one arm and twisted his foot to set the sole of his boot against the slick marble, pushing with it as he pulled. The few inches he gained sent a sickening wave of pain through him and he stopped, breathing through it, smelling the sour scent of his sweat, tainted by fear.

_All gotta die sometime. Just finish what you started. Get him the help he needs._

He slid his hand across the floor again, braced with his foot and moved another few inches along the smooth surface. At this rate it would take him till winter to get across the fucking floor, he thought tiredly, wiping the sweat that was dripping from his face against his shoulder.

He couldn't move faster. It would take as long it took. He reached out again, flattening his palm on the floor and pushing himself further.

* * *

_**Field of Gold Stadium, Atlanta**_

Sam felt the disconnection instantly. And looking down at Dean, past the angel's rage and hatred, he felt it flood him, a tide rising slowly at first, then faster, so much, so many memories, an ocean of feeling that seeped into every cell, pushing the celestial frequency out, one shining moment at a time, forcing the prison bars apart, an irresistible force against the immovable object inside of him.

_No, like this, Dean crouched beside him, showing him again how to make the loop and draw the other one through_. That's good, Sammy, what's that word? _It's okay, just a graze. Warm arms holding him, his face pressed against a narrow chest._ The tightness of fear dissolving as he felt his brother climb into the bed beside him, sniffles in the dark but a sense of security nonetheless. _A-hole! Wrestling on the couch at Bobby's, his brother using only his strength, not his skill._ Yeah, you're a snot-nosed kid but you're still my brother. _Learning to ride a bike._ Learning to load a magazine. _That first heartbreak and his brother's voice, cracking high as the arm dropped around his shoulder. Just a girl, Sammy. Not worth cryin' over…_

Memories, tied to a life that he'd hated._ Had thought he'd hated. Tied to a family he'd been part of yet felt apart from. _But not._ Not apart. Blood and history and pain and laughter and tears and sweat and always, always that feeling, down in the core of it all … over and under and through. Safe. Protected. _Loved_._

_I mean, I want us … I want us to be together again. I want us to be a family again._ You know, I've tried so hard to keep you safe. I can't. I'd rather die. _Just 'cause I gotta die doesn't mean you have to, okay?_ Sammy, all I'm saying is that you're my weak spot. _I'm sorry. I mean, this is all my fault, I know that. But what you're doing, it's not gonna save me. It's only gonna kill you._

He felt Lucifer's attention turn, the focus narrowing back to him.

_You think he loves you, Sam? You think anyone does? This was ALL YOUR FAULT! Everything that has happened has been because of you! Your mother died because of you – and Jessica – and your brother was shattered and torn – breaking in the fires of Hell and all because of YOU, because you were too arrogant, too full of your delusional strength – because you failed, you killed them –_

For a moment, he believed in the words that flew at him like knives. Doubt. Breathtaking shame as the devil threw his choices at him. Guilt and the agony of never being able to undo what he had done, of never finding redemption for those sins.

– _you don't deserve to be loved, you don't deserve to feel it, Sammy, inside you're as black as I am – _

He didn't deserve it, he knew that, but incrementally, recognition filtered through the ranting and raging of the angel, recognition that he loved anyway, that he was _loved_ … anyway … there were no rules to it, no blame or judgement when it was itself, it saw weakness and flaws as clearly as strengths and virtues, valuing both for the way the combination made the person unique and irreplaceable. It gave everything and asked for nothing in return, and like the soul, it could be battered and bruised and left untended but it could not be broken.

Inside of him, that feeling, that pure emotion, rose suddenly and it filled him completely, drowning out the angel's screams, wrapping around the darkly lit fury of the fallen and binding him in unbreakable chains of love and memory. Sam felt the crystalline lattice shatter and he looked out through his own eyes, with his own human vision, and lifted his hand wonderingly, the action normal yet strange, it'd been so long since he done it himself.

He turned and saw his brother lying on the grass just outside the circle. There wasn't much recognisable in Dean's face, swollen and broken and painted in blood, bruises rising like spectres under the cuts and grazes and the bones misshapen under the skin.

"Dean, I've got him," he whispered, staring down at him. "He can't get loose now."

* * *

Drowning. This was drowning, Dean thought remotely, drowning in a sea of agony that had no beginning and no end, where there were no landmarks or anchor points, no references of any kind. There weren't any connections to his body now, just the pain and the long, slow beat of his heart, somewhere in the internal mess of blood and bone, stopping and starting, stuttering every now and then as if it might give up. More distantly there was the hiss and rasp of his breath, fluttering over lips that didn't feel like his.

_Trapped._

The thought emerged from the pain gradually, without meaning. There was an urgency attached to it but he couldn't see what that was, couldn't understand why he should care.

_More to do._

Not for him. There was nothing more he could do. He couldn't move. Couldn't think. Could only feel, the ebb and flow of the pain, held within its grasp and the rest of the world not there.

_Get up._

No. He'd shot his wad and he couldn't move. He was done. He was dying.

_More to do. Get up._

Trapped Lucifer, he thought, a faint trickle of irritation creeping in through the barbed thickets of agony. Trapped him in the circle. Done. Lost friends. More friends. Lost Rufus. Lost Cas. Grief. More pain. Lost Emmett and lost Max. Trying to fight the devil. Trying to make it all over. What was left for him but to die alone here?

_I do, you know._

There was memory.

And the memory brought comfort. And it brought trust. And a yearning that reached out from the very centre of him, where he lived and breathed, where it was just him and nobody else. He'd never been able to believe in it. Not for him. Not that vulnerability. Not that need. Not that peace.

_I do love you._

He forced open the eye that still worked. Lucifer was trapped in the circle, but there was more to do. The thought was coherent, cutting through the amorphous fog that still held him and slowly pushing back the pain that was leeching the strength from his body.

He hadn't finished the job.

And if he was going to die, he didn't want to do it here. He wanted to be home. Wanted to feel that love around him, to see if it was real. It'd been so full of promise and hope that he'd been automatically suspicious of it, automatically afraid of it, until he'd felt it seep down, felt it wash him clean. Until he'd thought he might be able to return it.

He heard a voice, distantly. A familiar voice. Blood … family … brother.

_Sam._

"Dean, it's okay. I've got him."

Lifting his head, Dean's eyes fluttered shut for a second as pain crashed over him again, breath whistling between his teeth as he forced himself through it, past it. The torn muscles across his stomach shrieked at him as he pushed down with the arm under him. The vodka was strong but the meat was rotten, he thought irrelevantly, the old translation joke drifting in between heartbeats as he waited for the razors to stop slicing through him. Where'd he heard that? Some movie.

In his mind's eye, he saw her eyes, filled with what she was feeling, looking at him. Feeling for him. Open and transparent. Unafraid. The image was somehow like a strand of music, and it called to a reciprocal melody, unacknowledged until now, a melody that was so familiar he couldn't work out why he didn't know the words.

_Things to do. Devil to kill. Peace to find. His brother to save. Someone he wanted._

A surge of strength fluxed through him, surprising him, and he made it all the way to his knees, spitting out the thick blood that filled his mouth, lifting a hand and wiping his face on a sleeve. He felt along the grass behind him and his fingers curled around the slim shaft of the Spear.

_Just let me do this. Just let me finish what I started. Just let me do this._

He propped the end of the Spear against the ground and pushed down hard, getting his foot under himself and staggering upright.

"Dean – don't," Sam said, staring across the flames at him. "You're too –"

"Cross out, Sammy," he grunted, wiping at whatever it was that was running down his face into his good eye. "Cross out of the circle."

Sam looked at him uncertainly. Lucifer's screams reached a high-pitched crescendo inside the locked tower of memory and emotion he'd drawn through his soul and the hold he had on the angel wouldn't last forever.

He stepped across the fire.

* * *

_**Brookhaven, Atlanta**_

The room _was_ circular, Rufus thought, peering in at floor level through the door he'd pushed open. And there _was_ a man. Translucent. Almost transparent. But there.

He was leaving a long trail of rapidly drying blood behind him, and the light-headedness, the dizziness, they were getting stronger, with every movement he made, every drop that pumped out of him. _Not much longer. Not much further to go_.

He didn't see the man's head tip forward. Or the eyes open, focussing on him, watching him drag himself across the floor.

Reaching the edge of the outer circle, he lay still for a moment, searching for enough energy to do what he had to do. He let his arm fall from his side, the clang of the blade held in it loud in the silence. Then he moved his hand and set the edge against the floor, scratching away the blood outline of the circle, making a gap.

The man standing inside of the trap … thickened … very gradually, substance returning as he watched the knife clear the way. The leash was being cut. There was still time.

And, somewhat miraculously, Winchester was still alive.

* * *

_**Field of Gold Stadium, Atlanta**_

Sam could feel the angel's struggles as he lifted his foot. Could feel the desperation growing. And he felt the deep throb of satisfaction in that. He would hold Lucifer tight and the angel would die and it would go some small way to reparation for all that had been done.

The sudden fierce sensation of burning was a shock. Only the angel burned, he wasn't supposed to –

_I am burning_, Lucifer told him furiously, _and while I burn so will you, as long as you hold me._

From the inside out, Sam felt the fire consuming him, the scream inside his head getting higher and higher.

_LET ME GO!_

Stumbling across the flames, his hands pressed against his ears as blood tricled from them and down his face, Sam released the angel and lost consciousness in the same instant.

* * *

Dean blinked as his brother pitched head first to the ground when he cleared the circle.

"Sam?" he croaked, hobbling over to him, leaning heavily on the Spear as he eased himself back down on his knees. There was a pulse, beating against the thin skin of Sam's neck. His brother's back rose and fell, slowly, but steadily.

_Two years being ridden by the devil, what'd you expect_, he asked himself bitingly. Sam was alive. And they could fix everything else, he thought. He hoped. He looked over the flames into the circle.

Lucifer was there. Had broken Sam's hold and stayed inside when his vessel had crossed out. Dean's vision was flat, two-dimensional, his depth perception screwed up with only one eye working. But he could see the darker area in the circle. Could see where the sunlight refused to touch. And the Spear would still kill him, he thought, gripping the shaft tightly and pulling himself to his feet again.

And this time, it would be for good.

The shifting, twisting shape in the circle coalesced and he saw Lucifer, not as he really was, he thought, but whatever way his mind could perceive him without the vision killing him. He wasn't bright, like the other angels. But he glowed with an inner light, a light that was something like red … or blue … or green but was none of those colours, not entirely. Not really.

_None of them know, do they, Dean? How hard it is to face yourself every single day. I was there, when you broke, I heard your soul scream out as you damned yourself for eternity._

A voice that was not a voice, that was a thought, a hammer, a drill, buzzed against his mind, and the pain he'd been holding back doubled, tearing and ripping through him.

"Still standing," he forced himself to say, his fingers slipping along the Spear's slim haft an inch. He tightened his grip and stared defiantly at the angel.

_Only just … and sinking every minute, every second. It was never for you. You thought it was but it turned out it wasn't. Your mother destroyed herself for Sam. Your father left, sacrificing himself so that you would live … to kill your brother. And Sammy? He never wanted to stay. Never wanted to be at your side. At your back. None of them wanted to live for you. None of them were prepared to give up everything … for you. You lead them to their deaths but they don't love you. Why is that, Dean?_

Just lies, and more lies, he told himself. But they weren't and his heart ached with that knowledge. He'd asked himself the same things, over and over, in the black watches of the night when sleep meant dreams awoken from his worst memories.

He felt the strength that had filled him slipping away, under the words, under the thoughts and memories and the bitter wash of despair. Surrounded by the deadly flames, the angel watched him calculatingly.

_Look at you … scarred … broken … no one will ever see anything of worth in you …if you can't find it, how will anyone else, Dean? They will smile and nod and run when you reach out …_

For the space of an indrawn breath, the only thing he could feel was a desolation, reaching through him, chilling him, taking his strength and his determination, taking his will and the depth of caring that riddled his soul like gold through rock. Dean closed his eyes as the pain flooded back. He was right. There was no hope for him. No second chance to be the man he'd wanted to be.

_I do, you know._

Her voice whispered amidst the torment of his thoughts, so softly that he barely noticed it. But he did. And it opened a door that he'd almost forgotten, had almost buried.

A door to the past. To a short-lived time when he'd never doubted, never felt lost or afraid.

Memory filled him, driving out the despair and the pain.

You want me to cut the crusts off? _Remember to let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better, her voice deep and sweet, and filled with love_. Angels are watching over you, sweetheart, watching over us all. _The smell of her hair, soft against the side of his face, and her arms wrapped so tightly around him_. You got him? I got him, and the steady heartbeat he could feel beneath his wide chest, the strong arms that held him up. _I think you might be a natural at this, son. A black-velvet voice, filled with pride and warmth_. You did a good job of protecting them, son. And you finished the job. I'm proud of you. Astonishment and a slowly spreading feeling that it was okay, it would be okay. _Dean, you're always welcome here. The house that sat behind the church, and Jim's hand gripping his shoulder._ Back to back and the gunfire a cannonade in his ears, knowing that the man behind him would die before he let anything through. _You boys—you're beat to hell. Feeling that reluctance, even thought he knew it wasn't safe to stay_. You're like my own family, how could I let it take you? Cap pushed back and Bobby's eyes wide.

All of his memories, strong and bright, of his mother, of his father. Sam. Bobby and Jim and Caleb and everyone who'd stood up for him, stood beside him. It brought a tidal wave of emotion, a fucking _avalanche_ of feeling, coloured and edged with pain but still strong, still _his_. And at the centre was a woman with maple-gold hair, who knew the worst things about him, the worst that he'd done and felt, who hadn't fled, hadn't flinched, who taken his hand when he'd reached out and had _held on_.

He opened his eyes, the corner of his mouth lifting a little as he stared back at the angel. Someone had held on. The pain receded as he straightened, his hand sliding higher on the Spear. There was a whirlwind inside of him, gathering strength, lifting him right along with it and it'd always been there, but he'd never looked for it, had never believed in it, had never _seen_ its strength before.

In the circle, the angel stilled, and in some non-physical way, he could feel the devil's confusion, his shock and disbelief, an impotent fury that changed the colours he could see to the flickering and mutable iridescent gleam of oil on water. Like a fucking mood ring, he thought, the association widening the cold, one-sided smile.

"Guess you're not as all-powerful as you wanted me to believe," he said softly. "You shouldn't have fucked with my family, Lucifer."

_Your family –!?_ The angel's not-voice rose piercingly and was cut off.

"Any time you're ready, Dean."

Behind the angel, an entity stood, in the guise of a man, straight and skeletal, the shape of the devil writhing in its arms.

It felt like a cloak, warm and soft and heavy around him and he drew it closer, breathing in deeply as he stepped across the flames and raised the Spear, the light glancing off the razor-sharp edge. It felt like plugging into a power station. It felt like floating in the sea. He pushed the thoughts aside impatiently as he crossed the fifty-yard line. It didn't need analysis. It just was.

The tip of the leaf-shaped blade slid effortlessly through the angel, but the power that arced out from it and fed back through him, looping between, was monstrous, enormous, overwhelming. Dean stretched up, every muscle contracted tightly as his hands gripped the Spear and he felt the life-force of the angel being incinerated by it, unaware that his eyes were closed, head thrown back, the tendons in his neck standing out like wire, a scream roaring out of his throat as the pain inside him deepened and widened and strengthened, becoming unbearable. Becoming unendurable.

* * *

The crowds watched the struggle, between man and angel and Death, the scream reaching into everyone there. The three protagonists were curiously still, only Dean moving, and that involuntarily as whatever passed to him through the Spear set off a convulsion that pushed him high onto his toes and threw him backward, a flash of light and the skeletal frame of Death staggering back from it, the entity's arms closed tightly around nothing.

For a heart beat, the silence that filled the grounds was deafening. Then it was filled, a thousand weapons cocked to one side of the arena, and the soft roar of wings from the other. In between the two armies, the demons exploded from their meatsuits, winding together to form a charcoal cloud that ribboned up into the sky and vanished as the people they'd possessed dropped to the ground, many already dead.

* * *

Sunlight. Warm on his face. And he couldn't feel any pain. The memory of it was there, just within arm's reach if he felt for it. But the pain itself had gone.

Dean opened his eyes and squinted as he saw a bright blue sky, the dazzling disc of the sun in the centre, shining down on him. Both eyes were working, he realised belatedly, and he turned cautiously, looking down the length of his body when there were no stabs, no lightning bolts of agony, nothing but the feel of his bones and muscles and tendons, all in their usual places, all working normally. He rolled over and got to his feet.

Beside him, Death extinguished the flames of the circle. The cadaverous-looking man turned to him and looked him over carefully.

"I'm surprised that you're still alive."

"I thought you had something to do with that?" Dean asked, gingerly touching his face. Bones were all intact. No swelling. Not even tender.

"Yes, but even I have my limits," the entity said, brushing dust fastidiously from his sleeve. "Some deaths only God can undo."

"Huh," Dean said, looking curiously at him. "I thought you were the final word on death."

Death smiled thinly. "No."

Dean turned and looked at Sam, lying in the grass. "Can you heal him?"

"I can undo the ravages of having that angel in him for years," he said, turning to look at the man's body, sprawled on the ground. "But I cannot repair the damage that's been done to his mind, to his soul." He sighed. "Only he can do that."

Sam had been struggling for years, Dean thought unhappily. It wasn't going to be enough that Lucifer was gone. Not for a while. Maybe not ever.

"Do what you can," he said, walking to his brother. He crouched beside him and slipped an arm under his shoulders. "He's paid enough."

The entity sniffed delicately but refrained from commenting, bending over Sam and touching him lightly. Dean felt him jerk under Death's fingers, saw the colour return to his skin, felt his heart beating more strongly against his arm, and his brother dragged in a deep breath, his eyes opening as he lurched upright.

"Take it easy," Dean murmured, putting a restraining hand on his shoulder.

Sam looked around and shook his head, rolling to one knee and getting up. He looked down at the ground as Dean got up beside him.

"Don't think about it, Sam, not yet."

"I can't … not."

"Yeah, you can," Dean argued mildly. "There's a helluva lot we still have to do, and a lot to catch up on. I need you focussed."

Sam didn't respond.

"It's good to see you, looking out again, Sammy," he added quietly. "I, uh, well, I didn't know …" He trailed off as Sam looked at him, forehead wrinkling up. Taking a step closer to him, Dean wrapped his arms around his brother tightly. After a moment, he felt the hug tentatively returned, felt a shiver run down through Sam's body and a deep huff of breath against his neck, as his brother's grip tightened.

* * *

_**Brookhaven, Atlanta**_

Rufus sat by the circle, looking down at his stomach, pulling aside the blood-soaked shreds of his shirt and seeing the smooth, unmarked skin beneath. The man he'd freed had touched him in passing and it all had vanished. He tipped back his head and let out his breath in a long, slow exhale.

"Where's Dean?"

He turned and saw the angel standing in the doorway, felt his brows shoot up in surprise. "Thought you were dead."

Cas walked over to him, shrugging slightly. "I was brought back."

"By God?"

"No other could've done it," Cas said, reaching out to the hunter. Rufus took the offered hand and let the angel pull him to his feet. "Did Dean kill Lucifer?"

Rufus looked away. "I don't know," he said slowly. "Not here. Demons attacked us after he took you out, and he crossed out of the circle over the top of them. Dean took off after them."

"The stadium."

"I guess."

"We must free Michael," the angel said, dropping his hand to Rufus' shoulder.

The hunter felt a wrench and he was hanging in a black void, unable to see or hear or feel or breathe. Then they stood in the empty room, his knees shaking as he staggered away from the angel and stared at the circle of fire.

* * *

_**Vinings, Atlanta**_

"Well?" Michael turned to look at them as they appeared in the room.

Castiel opened his mouth to speak when they felt it. One of the songs would be sung no longer. A celestial wave had vanished, dragging with it the darkness it had drawn about itself, the temptations it had sent out into the aether.

"He did it," Cas said, his voice filled with awe and not a little disbelief.

Michael nodded, unable to believe it either. A mortal man. A _human_. Against his brother. It was an impossibility.

Castiel turned to look at him, face smooth and expressionless, but the dark blue eyes alight with an un-angel-like joy. "I told you not to doubt him."

"He must have had help," Michael said, shaking his head.

"He did," Rufus said, rubbing a hand over his face. "Doesn't change anything. Help doesn't come to those who haven't earned it."

"Set me free."

Cas looked down at the flames and spread out his hands, lowering them. The flames dropped to the floor and died and the archangel stepped across the charred line on the polished floor.

"He's at the stadium?"

"I believe so," Cas nodded, reaching out to Rufus' shoulder again before the hunter could move away.

* * *

_**Field of Gold Stadium, Atlanta**_

"I don't understand," Dean looked down at the bodies of Emmett and Max. "Why?"

"Because their time was finished," Death said patiently. "They had done all that they were supposed to."

"They had years –"

"No, Dean," the entity cut him off. "They had a task to complete and they completed it. Together." He looked at the man compassionately. "They were energy. They still are. They will return to another form. Mourn if you must, but do not doubt that the natural order must be upheld, or we would live in the chaos that child-angel wanted so much."

"Why bring me back then?"

"You're different. I told you, you stand on the junction of a great many lines, Dean. And your tasks are not yet complete."

He vanished as Dean opened his mouth to argue that, leaving the hunter to stare balefully around him in frustration.

"So, you succeeded."

He spun around at the deep baritone voice behind him, his heart lifting as he saw the two who flanked the archangel.

"I had help, but yeah, I guess I did," Dean said, looking back at Michael. "Lets you off the hook."

Michael sniffed. "I was never 'on the hook'," he said coldly. He looked up at the stands, seeing the still ranks of seraphim standing silently there. "Your brother lives?"

Dean nodded, glancing at Sam who stood a few yards away, listening to Boze and Franklin.

"He held Lucifer, long enough to trap in the circle," he told the archangel.

"You have both surprised me," Michael admitted reluctantly. "There was never any plan to wipe humankind from this planet. That was something that Lucifer told his followers he would do, but it was not a part of destiny's weavings."

"Good to know," Dean commented, wondering why the angel was telling him. "What happens to the rebel faction now?"

Michael turned to Castiel. "You have been restored. Will you return?"

Dean looked at Cas, brows rising. "Got your juice back?"

Cas nodded. "Yes, I am an angel again."

"Going back up there?"

Castiel heard the trace of regret in the man's voice and sighed inwardly. The choices were always too hard, he thought.

"Yes, I have my duty as you have yours," he said, looking at Michael. "Dealing the conspirators in Heaven will be my first priority."

The archangel looked at him thoughtfully, then shrugged. "Where is Gabriel?"

"Here," Gabriel said, appearing at his side. "We going?"

Michael frowned at him. "You have spent too much time down here, Gabriel."

"I didn't like the company at home."

"Wait a minute," Dean said, looking at the archangel. "You gonna cut Adam loose?"

Michael looked down at the vessel he inhabited. "Yes."

"You putting him back where you found him or leaving him here?" Dean asked, a little belligerently, irritation rising at the indifference of the angels.

"I can't 'put him back', Dean," Michael said impatiently. "I've resurrected his body and returned his soul to it."

"So he stays?"

"Yes."

"He'll be okay?" Dean pressed him.

The archangel frowned at him. "He will be intact, he will remember a little. Not much." He turned to Gabriel. "Open the way."

Dean felt Rufus' hand close around his arm, drawing him back as the archangel lifted a horn to his lips.

"Don't want to go getting' sucked up there, not yet, anyway," Rufus muttered next to his ear.

The single note hung in the air for a long moment, and Dean backed up further, the humans on the grounds doing the same as a long slit of brilliant light appeared next to Michael. The stadium was filled with the sound of beating wings, with the smell of flowers and feathers, and the pure, white light that became stronger and stronger as the slit in the fabric of reality widened. Through narrowed eyes and from behind his upraised arm, Dean watched the Host disappear into the light, Castiel following them, trenchcoat swinging out and Gabriel walking into it behind him, the tear closing itself behind them and leaving nothing more than a memory. Michael blazed with the same white light for a fraction of a second and Adam dropped to the ground as it died away.

"Somethin' you don't see every day," Boze said, his voice carrying in the silence of the field. Someone laughed nervously and Dean felt the massed wash of relief that swept the grounds, relief that it was over, relief that they were still alive, relief that they could finally go home.

Going to Adam, he dropped to his knees, feeling for a pulse, feeling his half-brother's chest rise and fall under his hand. Adam opened his eyes and looked up at him, his expression blank with shock.

"What happened?"

Dean sighed. "That's a – it's a long story," he told him, easing him upright. He remembered Jimmy complaining about being Cas' vessel. "You hungry?"

"Famished."

"C'mon, that we can take care of," he said, getting to his feet and extending a hand to Adam. "The rest, we'll have to deal with a bit at a time."

He looked at Sam, his brother lifting his gaze to meet his eyes and cut away again.

"Franklin, you got something that Adam can eat?"

Franklin nodded, taking Adam through the throng.

"Get on the radio, Boze, tell everyone we're heading out," Dean said decisively, looking at the older hunter. "We've still got another eight-hundred and fifty miles to get through and you can bet every demon that's been left here is gonna want some payback."

Boze nodded and walked toward the milling crowds, bellowing out as he called for their attention.

"How many people have we got here?" Rufus asked, looking around at the packed stadium in astonishment.

"No idea," Dean said, shrugging as he headed for Sam. "We'll need vehicles, weapons, supplies and equipment to get everyone back safely."

"What happened to the free humans who were working for Lucifer?"

"Don't know that either." He stopped and looked around the field. "Maybe they took off. I don't care. So long as they don't come near us, they can go figure it out for themselves."

* * *

_**Marietta, Atlanta**_

Sam looked at the long lines of vehicles that filled the interstate, curving around the cloverleaf on and off ramps, with a sense of disbelief that kept growing. Who were all these people who'd fought the devil on his brother's command?

He turned to look at Dean as he walked up, brow creasing up as he gestured at the lines. "Who are they all?"

Dean followed his gaze. "Survivors," he said. "You didn't know about the cities?"

Sam shook his head. "I knew when you did something but I only got occasional glimpses as to exactly what you'd done, what had happened." He looked around. "All these people, they came from the cities he got running again?"

"Most. A couple of thousand were here, in Atlanta. He was going to kill them to open the gate," Dean told him.

"How – how many are left?" Sam asked abruptly, looking at him. "In the world? How many survived?"

Dean forced himself to keep eye contact. "We don't know. Not for sure."

"How many do you think?"

"Maybe ten percent," Dean said uneasily. "Most of those were the virus."

Sam shuddered, his face whitening and his head bowing. Dean stepped closer to him. "I shouldn't have left you, Sam. I thought I was doing the right thing, but – it wasn't. I was wrong."

His brother shook his head slightly, lifting his head and staring bleakly at him. "That doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what the circumstances were. It only matters what the results were, right?"

"Sam –"

"Don't. Okay?" Sam stood up, shifting his arm out of Dean's grasp. "I need to figure this out."

"Not alone, Sam."

"You can't help," Sam said. "I know you want to, but you can't." His mouth twisted in a humourless smile. "I couldn't help you and now you can't help me. Just … I need time, Dean … I'll figure it out."

He walked away, following the line of cars down the grey concrete breakdown lane and Dean watched him go, knowing exactly what he meant, knowing that Sam would have to get it out, sooner or later, but he wouldn't do it with him. Anymore than he'd been able to talk to his brother when he'd come out of Hell.

He turned around and kept walking, down to the rough command centre Boze and Franklin had set up. They were just about ready to go, the tankers refilled at the reservoirs, cars and trucks and bikes and buses filled with gas from the few dozen fill-up joints in the surrounding area, everything they could scrounge to get the people out of here.

Another twenty-five hundred, he thought absently as he walked, on top of those of the army that'd survived. Where the hell were they going to put them? The town would hold a thousand, within the new fortifications. He shook his head. It didn't matter, they would find a way to get everyone housed and fed and trained up so that they could at least take care of themselves.

He wondered about what he would do, when they got back to Tawas and everyone had found their places there. Keep running Chitaqua? Keep hunting? Take care of Sam, he thought, a little uncomfortably. Stay on board and make sure everyone was safe. The weight of that realisation settled on him and he dragged in a deep breath to counteract it. It was what he did. It was all he knew how to do.

_Your tasks are not yet complete_. Death's words echoed in his thoughts and he frowned at the thought, wondering what the entity had been talking about. The devil was dead. The demons could be killed or sent back to the pit. He didn't know what else he was supposed to do.

He saw Sean ahead and lifted a hand, lengthening his stride.

* * *

_**I-75 Kentucky**_

"What do you remember?" Dean glanced into the rearview mirror at Adam.

Rufus glanced at the young man sitting next to him, wondering if the poor kid would ever get his head straight.

"I remember dying," Adam said brusquely. "I remember see my mother lying on the floor, already dead."

Dean felt Sam flinch beside him and glanced at him worriedly. His brother's skin was too thin at the moment.

"I remember seeing you, seeing you both on a road. Just a glimpse. There was a tall, sick-looking guy there as well," Adam said slowly.

_Pestilence_, Dean thought, rubbing a hand over his face. "Michael said he got you out of Heaven."

"I don't remember that."

"You know who we are?" Sam asked, half-turning to look at Adam.

The young man nodded. "I was told of my history. My father. You." He looked out the window. "Doesn't mean anything to me, you know."

Dean glanced sideways at his brother. Sam had turned away, his gaze fixed to the scenery flashing past. He caught Rufus' expression as he looked back at the road, the older man looking at him with a rueful twist to his mouth. Lifting a shoulder slightly in acknowledgement, he let the silence stretch out. Sometimes being on the road wasn't such a great place to have a conversation like this.

* * *

They bypassed Cincinnati at midday, and the sun shifted to the other side of the car. Rufus was driving, Dean leaning in the corner between seat and door on the passenger seat, Sam and Adam sitting in the back.

Eyes half-open, watching the countryside speed by, the rampant growth exaggerated by the scarcity of buildings left in the countryside, Dean thought about what had happened to him, in the circle.

It'd been what Jerome had said, he thought. What Bobby had told him. That power, that surge of strength couldn't have come from anywhere but himself. The memories – his _good_ memories – had done it, somehow. He snorted inwardly at his own reluctance to admit to the truth. It hadn't been the memories, but what the memories had held, within them.

That fierce, bright yearning rose up again and he held himself apart from it for a moment, trying to see what it meant, what he wanted so much. Someone to know him? Someone to care about him? Someone to care about. He did care, he knew. He cared about the people he considered under his protection, there because of him. He cared that they were safe. That they would remain safe. He cared too much, most of the time. He'd cared about Lisa and he'd known that it wasn't enough. Not for her. Not for him. This was different. But he wasn't sure … wasn't sure of how.

Another memory traced a delicate path along his nerves and he tensed a little with it, feeling a deep, low heat uncoiling inside. That had just been sex … hadn't it? Just chemistry, or whatever the current theory was for the inexplicable way two people could sometimes become more than just bodies, just sensations. Rubbing a hand over his jaw, he wondered why he'd never felt it before, like that, why the physical memories were imbued with a depth and richness of feeling that had come as a complete shock to him, that had shredded his control and had turned him inside-out and upside-down and had made every touch feel as if he'd been riding the lightning.

He was scared. That much he could admit to. He'd been scared then, as well, underneath. He didn't think he could give himself up to someone else, let himself want and need like that. He'd been armourless with his family and the losses and the betrayals had ripped him apart, had ground him down until he'd needed something else to shut that pain away.

And she was the same, he thought. Running and hiding. From herself more than anyone else. Except … that she'd stopped. He remembered the look in her face, in her eyes, when he stepped close to her. Fear had been in them, fear of letting him in, he thought. But she hadn't run from it. Hadn't run from him.

That thundery, shivery feeling was back and he pressed his temple against the glass of the window. He would know, when they got back, he thought, closing his hands into fists to stop the faint tremble he could feel in his fingers.

* * *

Sam eased his legs to one side, forestalling the beginnings of a cramp he could feel building with the tight position. Even in the front, the well hadn't been quite long enough.

He was doing his best not to think about anything, but it wasn't good enough.

_Because this thing, this blood, it's not in you the way it's in me. It's just something I got to deal with._

He remembered the silence in the car as his brother had absorbed that. It wasn't the blood, he knew. He'd tried to blame the blood – Azazel's, Ruby's – but it wasn't the blood. It was the choices he'd made. Thinking he was doing the right thing. Thinking he was helping, saving people, doing what his brother would've wanted him to do when Dean was no longer around.

The visions … the power … god, he'd been so scared of those. Scared for himself, and terrified by the fear he'd seen in his brother's face. When the demon had been killed, they'd gone and that had been a relief. But what he'd been able to do, when Ruby's blood had slid down his throat … that had been worse. He hadn't had to look at it through Dean's eyes but he'd known, inside himself, that he was changing, turning himself into something that was –

He cut that thought off as it slid too close to another memory. He'd wanted to stop but by then it'd been impossible, the itching, crawling sensation filling his veins, clawing, tearing at his mind … he'd needed it, and he'd needed to believe that there was a just reason for it. A righteous reason for it. A cause that would make whatever he did alright. Killing Lilith. Saving the world. Step right up, Ruby had told him and he'd believed. Had needed to believe. And the trap had closed around him.

It was strange, but even the knowledge that he'd let the devil out hadn't been as bad as watching Dean struggle to tell him what his decision had done to him. What his brother had shown him had been the very tip of the iceberg of agony Dean'd been feeling. He knew that. His brother had let so many things go. Had given him so much leeway in the things he'd done. He still had nightmares about the repeated clicks of the hammer falling onto the empty chamber. Still felt a shiver as his words returned to him, driven out by a siren's poison, and he'd told Dean that they weren't his, it wasn't him, but it had been … a part of him that he was ashamed of, a part he'd tried not to look at … and his brother had known that.

In Garber, he'd tried to get his head around it all but it had been impossible. The tangle of what he'd done, what he'd felt, what he'd thought he was trying to achieve, the memories and the way he'd seen it, looking back, they'd all gone around and around inside with no answers, no solutions, no way to get them straight. He'd realised that he couldn't do it alone. And there was only one person he trusted enough to be able to do it with. But that person had gone.

_I don't know you and I'm the last person to be giving advice, but I do know that no one has ever done anything so bad that they can't be forgiven._

Lindsey's words came back to him and his face screwed up at them. Wrong again. No one could forgive him for what he'd done. He couldn't forgive himself for what he'd done. And after Jamieson and Summers had left, he'd gone too, unable to get the taste out of his mouth, unable to shut down the craving that had filled him, and the fear it had brought.

Abomination, Uriel had called him. It's what he was. What he'd believed he was. Did he still believe that? He didn't know. What had risen through him, what he'd drawn enough power from his soul to overwhelm Lucifer and bind him, that had not been an abomination. That had … that had felt like salvation, those few brief moments of being able to see himself again, feel himself again, not the broken and wrecked man he'd been when his brother had gone to Hell, not even the terrified and uncertain boy who'd seen visions … but really himself. The Sam who'd fallen in love in one afternoon and had been sure of everything whenever he'd looked into Jess' eyes.

He wanted that Sam back. Wanted to be that Sam again. He didn't know if it was possible. Didn't know how to get from here to there. The groan emerged barely audible and he turned his head to the window, hunching back against the seat and closing his eyes. He had to believe it was. Because the alternative … there just wasn't an alternative.

* * *

Rufus stretched up, easing the stiffness in his back. Death had barely looked at him when it'd passed by. But he'd felt … what, exactly? A gratitude? A relief? Something. He didn't know how he'd known that the entity would go to help Dean. He'd felt that it was something he had to do, just had to. Cast your bread upon the waters, he thought, a little nervously. One good turn deserves another. All the clichés playing tonight.

He flicked at glance at the man hunched up beside him. The first time he'd met Dean, he'd been impressed in spite of himself, in spite of what he'd known and what he'd told the younger man. There were some people who simply did what had to be done, with no thought of what the price would be or how long they would have to pay. Bobby had said that Dean was on his way to Hell in the call that'd precipitated that meeting. Rufus had never doubted it. He'd been surprised when he'd heard he was out. More surprised when Bobby had told him how he'd gotten out.

He'd been hunting for a long time. A long, long time. He'd paid the price and he'd lost the people he'd loved and he'd let himself withdraw further and further from everyone and everything, trying to lessen the hurt that was with him from the moment he woke until the moment he closed his eyes and often throughout his dreams as well. It hadn't been the right way. It'd been the coward's way to pull back like that. It'd taken a young man with a smart mouth and a cocky swagger and a will like a diamond to make him see it. He still felt the pull toward finding someplace to hide, to be on his own and forget about the world. But in the last couple of years it'd become weaker.

Dean didn't ask for anything. He knew he wouldn't have asked Death for help in bringing Lucifer down. The entity had chosen to help anyway. Hell, he hadn't even asked any of the people who'd made up his army and had marched down most of the length of the country to fight with him. He just did what he did and those around were … compelled, almost, he thought, to walk beside him. He'd felt that way. Compelled to offer his skill and knowledge, his strength and sneakiness in that crusade against the devil.

And now it was over. He pulled in a deep, contented breath and let it out. He wanted to see Dominique, he thought, one side of his mouth lifting slightly. Wanted to get just a little drunk on the nectar of the gods and eat real food and stretch out with her and let the grief and the memories of the last couple of weeks disappear in the warmth of her eyes and the softness of her mouth and the deft surety of her touch. He changed gear, his gaze catching sight of the sign to his left that told him he'd hit Detroit another twenty-five miles. Lake Erie glittered in the sunshine on his right as he looked for the bypass. They were almost home.

* * *

Adam stirred as he felt the car turn, opening his eyes and looking out at the lush, green vegetation that filled the side of the road. He saw the sign, battered and missing some paint, but still shining in the soft afternoon light. Highway 23. East Tawas. Thirty-seven miles.

To the right of the car, a lake extended as far as he could see. Huron, he guessed. He looked at the still figure beside him, long legs bent and awkwardly positioned in the footspace behind the front seat. His brother.

Half-brother, he amended to himself. Sam. The archangel had told him that Sam had released Lucifer. Had been tainted by a demon as an infant and had broken the last seal to Lucifer's cage. He'd had all sorts of images in his head about him, but none had matched up with the tall, broad-shouldered, sad-faced young man he'd met. He turned his head and looked forward, as Dean woke and straightened in his seat. The images he'd had for the eldest Winchester hadn't matched up either. Michael's commentary on Dean had been scathing. It'd taken him awhile to realise that had been due to the fact that Dean was the preferred vessel of the archangel and Michael had been royally pissed at being denied it.

Michael had said that Dean had been to Hell. That was a hard one to get his head around. The archangel hadn't really elaborated on the why or how or wherefore of it. He'd said God had commanded that he be raised. And that was another difficult concept to process. He was related to a man whom God had taken an interest in. What the fuck was he supposed to do with that? These men weren't his family. He didn't know anything about them except the bare bones of the family history, told with a jaundiced slant by an angry angel.

He wasn't sure why he'd agreed to come back with them. Except, of course, there'd been nowhere else for him to go. A wide, empty planet. He'd thought it might be better to stay with people until he figured out what he wanted to do with his second chance at living a life.

"How much further?" Dean asked tiredly, rubbing his face and looking at Rufus.

"'Nother twenty mile, give or take," Rufus said cheerfully. "Should be able to see the camps when we get around that point," he added, looking at Adam through the mirror.

Adam looked away pointedly. He didn't care what the damned things looked like. He wanted to get some food and get some sleep because he hadn't had enough of either in too long.

He felt Dean's gaze turn and rest on him curiously. Looking back at him, his gaze caught something else through the windshield, and shifted past his half-brother.

"What's that?"

Dean turned back to the front, as Rufus squinted at the distant shapes against the bright sky.

Smoke was rising behind the low hills, black and grey and white, curling lazily into the sky.

Dean stared at it. "Rufus, step on it."

Rufus pushed the accelerator down, his fingers tightening around the wheel as the speedometer climbed from fifty to ninety.

* * *

_**East Tawas, Michigan**_

Behind them, the long, snaking convoy slowed as well as they came around the sweeping turn to the river. Dean flicked on the radio under the dash, picking up the microphone as he stared through the windshield.

"Boze? Take your people up to Tawas," he said. The radio crackled briefly and Boze's voice, shocked and raw, filled the car.

"_Yeah, I'll let you know when I get there."_

Turning around, Dean watched the truck the other man was driving turn left and head north.

"Franklin, check South West," he said into the mike.

"What about us?" Rufus breathed, slowing down as they saw the holes, the blackened buildings and pitted streets, the loose, tumbled stone of the defensive walls and the still-smouldering timbers.

"Chitaqua," Dean said shortly. "Now."

Sam stared at the devastation of the landscape. His brother had told him that after the passing of the archdemon, the land had looked like a mine slag. No colour at all. He'd seen it around the city of Atlanta but hadn't really been able to envisage the entire country looking the same way. But this … this looked like it too. There was colour. There were still trees and vegetation growing. And there was death, he thought, his breath catching as he saw the shape of an arm, hanging limply from beneath a charred roof.

He listened distantly as Dean gave orders to the others in the column, twisting around once to watch the vehicles peeling off at the cross-roads they came to, heading north and west. Their road followed the curve of the lake and Dean stared across the small bay, seeing not the roof tops of the buildings that should have been there, but a twisting ribbon of smoke, rising from something still burning.

* * *

It was ice that filled him as Rufus negotiated car around the crevasse that took up half the road, and they saw the perimeter fence, buckled and bent and flat on the ground where the uprooted trees had been thrown against it.

Dean could hear the trucks and buses behind them, engines deep in low gear as they picked their way slowly around and over the obstacles that filled the road and the driveway. He wasn't registering their sounds though, his eyes taking in the destruction that lay around, his mind in a numb state of shock. The house had collapsed and burned. He could see the massive timbers of the bearers and rafters, jumbled together and burning still, unwillingly in the damp air. The sheds, the cabins, they were all gone, craters and rubble in the places they had been.

Rufus pulled up in front of the blackened porch stairs and stopped the engine, and the other vehicles halted along the drive and the road, a cold silence filling what remained of the camp as the survivors got out and looked around them.

"Someone must've made it," Sam said uncertainly from the back seat.

Dean shook his head and got out of the car, his stride lengthening as he made the corner of the house, moving fast for the basement. "BOBBY! Ellen!"

The basement door was intact, the stone foundations above it holding the weight of that side of the house. He pushed it open, and stumbled down the stairs, his flashlight in his hand.

"Bobby! Chuck! Alex!"

From the gloom along one hallway, Chuck peered out. "We're here, Dean."

"Christ! Are you alright?" he said, looking past Chuck to the people behind the prophet. "Everyone alright?"

"Not quite, but we're getting there," Bobby's dry voice was deeper down the hall and Dean swung the light around, his chest easing as he saw the man upright, a tired smile creasing his grimy face.

"What – what happened?"

"Got a visit from a few fighter planes, three days ago," Bobby said with a shrug. "Ellen's got a broken leg, Kim set it, she'll be fine."

"And the others? Where's everyone else?"

Bobby's head ducked and Dean felt the icy tendrils of shock return to his veins. "You're it?"

"No," Chuck said beside him. "We headed down here when we heard you across the water, but the rest are in the woods, hiding. We weren't sure who'd won."

"Everyone out," Bobby said, turning back to the room. "It's – shit, Dean, it's a long story."

Dean turned away and walked back up the stairs, licking his lips as he came out and saw more people, walking slowly out through the half-grown woods, coming up from the rocky shore of the lake. None of them was the one he was looking for and the fact that no one had said anything was making it harder and harder to keep a hold on his fear.

"Chuck, where's Alex?"

Chuck pointed reluctantly to the flattened and unrecognisable pile of debris, taking up the space where the church had stood. "Under that," he said, his face screwing up. "Kim and Merrin are in there, with her."

He stared at the slender man, unwilling to ask anything else then turned abruptly, ignoring Sam and Adam as he skirted the cars and trucks and followed what had been the foundations of the main house back to the drive.

Slowing as he caught sight of Kim, he felt himself tense at the expression on her face as she looked up at him. She was crouched, in what had been a doorway, and was now only high enough to crawl through. She looked deeper under the cabin as he came up beside her.

"Merrin, Dean's here."

He doubled over, peering into the gloom. "Why hasn't anyone cleared this? Three days, Bobby said? The hell?!"

"We're afraid it will bring it down on top of Alex," Dr Sui admitted, shaking her head. "We started as soon as the planes had been brought down, Dean but it – the roof began to move, and we stopped. Merrin's got her on a drip."

He looked at the balanced logs and sheets of iron and pushed the problem aside for the moment, ducking his head as he crawled inside.

Away from the outside light, he could see the soft glow of a flashlight, much deeper in. The cracked floorboards creaked and shivered as he moved along them, dust trickling down as the incremental shifts in the pile above him resettled. In the faint light, he saw Merrin's face, pale and shocked and covered in dust, a smear of blood over her temple.

"You alright?"

She nodded. "I came in here after it happened," she told him, her voice hushed. Turning her head, she looked down at the floor and he followed her gaze slowly, not wanting to look. Jean-clad legs, the denim coated in dust and torn, protruded from under the edge of what had been one of the small children's desks.

"She's – she's just trapped?" he asked, knowing that it couldn't be that easy. Not for him.

"No, there's something –" Merrin dragged in a breath, brows drawing together. "There's something in her back. We can't move anything to see what it is and when we tried to pull her out –"

She stopped as he edged in beside her. He lifted his hand, staring at the thick, sticky blood that coated the palm, his gaze shifting back to the floor. The small pool had spread out from under the desk.

Merrin moved the light as Dean leaned past her.

Under the end of the table, Alex's face was bone-white, her lips pale.

"Alex," he breathed, and Merrin shook her head.

"She's unconscious," the nurse said. "As soon as we moved her, she started to bleed out and I've put two bags of blood into her to counteract that, but she's been on the drip for three days now and I don't think …"

Dean stared at the pulse in the hollow of Alex's throat. It was very slow and it was erratic.

He turned to look at Merrin's face as she trailed into silence, and saw her eyes brighten as she looked back at him. Something was breaking inside and he couldn't look at it. If he looked … and accepted it … he wouldn't be able to do anything, he knew. The emptiness would take over.

"She's dying?" he asked, forcing the words out.

"I didn't want her to be alone," Merrin said quietly, the flashlight's beam picking up the gleam along her cheek as she ducked her head to look back at the woman lying beside her.

_No._

Dean's jaw muscle leapt into relief as his throat closed up and his chest tightened.

_No. He was done with losing people._

"Merrin," he said, his voice rough and uneven, too loud in the tiny space. "Go and tell them to get the backhoes and the crane from Sable. They start with lifting off whatever they can by hand. We need to get her out of here."

She looked at him, her brow creasing up, and opened her mouth.

"Now." The word was barked out, as he looked back down at Alex.

He shifted to one side to let her go past him and watched as she crawled back toward the small square of light leading to the outside.

_NO._

Easing himself down beside her, he lay on his side, shoving his hand into the front pocket of his jeans. His fingertips found the smooth, round rings that were there. He pulled them out and apart, putting back three, and holding the fourth. The white jade shone in the light of the flashlight, almost glistening at him. He slid the ring onto the index finger of his right hand.

The shift was subtle, a tingling through his body, the knowledge that he and Alex weren't here by themselves. He looked past her white face at the amorphous shape that waited in the shadows under the lower end of the roof beam.

"Dean?"

The smoky, fragile shape thickened and solidified into an oval face, framed with dark hair. Dark brown eyes looked at him disbelievingly.

"Tessa, I need to talk to your boss."

She stared at him, her gaze dropping to the ring and returning to his face. "No."

"Tessa –" he snarled, eyes narrowing at her as he forgot what she was, what she did.

"Where did you get that ring?" she cut him off calmly, ignoring his tone.

"Tell Death I need to talk to him."

"I said, no."

"Tessa, c'mon, please, I don't have much time," Dean said, belatedly remembering how stubborn she could be. He swallowed against the desperation that was accelerating his pulse and looked down at the woman between them. "She's dying."

"Why do you think I'm here?"

"He can stop it."

"He could, but he won't," Tessa said with a certainty that stopped him cold. Abruptly he remembered the entity telling him that Emmet and Max had fulfilled their purpose.

"Still think you got a second chance, Dean? Still think something good was going to happen for you?"

"God_damn_ you!"

The corner of her mouth tucked in. "Maybe. But this is how it's supposed to be. I told you not to lie to yourself."

"Thank you, Tessa," Death's quiet voice filled the narrow cavity. "I'll handle this from here."

Dean's head snapped around to look at the entity, ignoring the reaper's disappearance. "Bring her back."

"I can't."

"Can't? Or won't?"

"Both, really," Death said, leaning over to look at her. "Her time here is completed."

"No, it's not," Dean ground out furiously. He was supposed to have had time. Time with her to figure it out. To figure it all out. To find a reason to keep going.

Death sighed, lifting his head to look steadily at the hunter. "Her death will put you on the path you need to be, Dean."

"What?"

"You heard me," he said, glancing down at Alex's face. "I told you your work hadn't been finished. There is a lot more you have to do. And this was devised to ensure that you do."

Dean stared at him hopelessly. "What the fuck does that mean? Why does she have to die?"

The entity that only looked like a man reached out, skeletal fingers gripping like talons into Dean's shoulder. And Dean felt the world around them vanish abruptly, lost in a moment of darkness, then he was standing on a hill above the ruins of a city.

_Beside him, Death stood silently, pointing down at the half-destroyed buildings below them. Dean saw himself, moving through the rampant foliage. _

The face of the man below was hard and cold, his eyes like a reptile's, flat and without any feeling at all.

He stopped as a man appeared before him, stocky, with a receding dark hairline and dark brown eyes crinkled up in a humourless smile. The man held Ben, the boy's arm twisted up behind him.

_On the hill, Dean took a half-step down and Death's grip restrained him._

"Dean."

"Crowley," the man with his face said coldly.

"Time to trade up."

"For the tablet?" the hunter said, lip curling up. "You don't have anything I need."

"Dean!" Ben croaked helplessly, as the demon forced his arm higher. "Please!"

"The boy for the tablet," Crowley offered, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the other man.

_Dean watched in horror as his – what? future self? – lifted the gun in his hands and fired, the small, black hole appearing in Ben's forehead, glinting red as his weight dropped against the demon's hold and Crowley let him fall to the ground._

"What boy?" the hunter said indifferently, staring into Crowley's face. "You think I'm gonna horse-trade this away, Crowley? I'm gonna do it, and there's nothing you can do to stop me."

"Then I'll see you down there when you die," Crowley said.

The hunter nodded. "I'm sure you will."

The demon vanished and the hunter looked around slowly. Behind him, Rufus got to his feet, staring down at Ben's body, his gaze flicking back up to the man who'd killed him. The hunter turned and caught his expression.

"I'm done making deals, Rufus," he said in a rasping snarl that was utterly devoid of feeling. "We're closing the gates and nothing, but nothing is going to stop that."

_On the hill, Dean swallowed against a sudden rise of gorge, his hands closing into fists with the desire to kill the man he'd become._

He felt his shoulder released, felt the hard boards under his elbow and hip again, his chest tight and his thoughts frozen at what he'd seen.

"You want me to turn into that?" he breathed, staring into the ancient eyes of Death.

"It's your destiny," Death said with a slight shrug, looking down at Alex. "She died. And you make the choices of what you're going to do and how you're going to do it, but you do it. You close the gates of Hell and Heaven."

Dean closed his eyes. Turn into a monster that killed without thought or remorse or feeling. Close the gates of Hell. Of Heaven. Driven, yes, he could see that. By her death? By the loss of what might've saved him? He felt nausea rise again and he swallowed against it, opening his eyes and rolling onto his side to look at the entity.

"No."

"No?" Death lifted a brow. "There is no choice."

"There's always a choice," Dean snapped. "And this is mine to make. You can let her die. I can't stop you. But I will not go down that road if you do."

"You will, you know," Death said calmly. "That is the road that lies ahead of you."

Dean shook his head. "No."

He looked at the man who held the power of life and death over everything. "I'll do whatever I have to do, I'll storm fucking Hell if that's what's needed, but only if you bring her back. I'm not turning into _that_ – not for you, not for destiny, not for God."

"Dean –"

"No. This is non-negotiable. I have free will, right? That's my will," he said, looking down at the still, pale face next to him. "I can't – she has to live. She lives or you'll have to find someone else to do your dirty work because I won't be around."

Silence stretched out between them and he could feel Death's consideration, the entity weighing his threat against the future. He remembered Jerome talking about a tablet, a stone read by a prophet. Demon destruction. Closing the gates against the demons and the angels. He would do it, but not like this. Not losing what he wanted. What he needed. Not having this loss, in the long line of so many, turn him into something that didn't care at all.

"Give me my ring," Death said with a weary exhale. Dean looked down at his hand and slid the ring off, handing it over.

"Get your people to get this house off her," the entity said quietly. "I'll keep her here until you can get her out."

Dean looked at him warily. "That's a promise, right? I got your word?"

The ancient eyes flashed with annoyance. "Yes."

* * *

Dean stood by the flattened doorway, his hands clenched, shoved into the pockets of his jacket as he watched the crane lifting the beam off. He couldn't see anything other than Alex, lying under the half-crushed desk, but he felt him there, keeping his promise. Keeping her here.

When the crane had lifted the beam clear, he scrambled across the remains of the wall, and dropped to his knees when he reached the desk, gingerly lifting it off her. The pool of blood had gone, he noticed, and there was colour in her face. Slipping his arm around her shoulders, he lifted her, and her eyes opened, blinking rapidly as she looked up into his face, then away, using her hand to push herself higher as she looked around.

"I was –" she said uncertainly, looking back at him.

He nodded. "Yeah, but not now."

He watched her hand slip around behind her, feeling for a wound, for something that still existed in her memory. He rocked onto his feet, pulling her up as he straightened.

"It's gone," he said, running his hand down over her back. "You're okay."

"You won?"

He smiled crookedly at the question. He'd forgotten about that. "Yeah, we won."

He became aware that the crowd surrounding the remains of the church were clapping and calling out, the attention making him uncomfortable.

"Think there's anywhere left to go that's a bit more private?" he asked her, his chest loosening as he saw her eyes soften, saw her face fill with the feelings he'd wanted to see again, all the long way down south and back.

"I doubt it, but we can look," she said, stepping close to him, her arms going around him. He ducked his head beside hers, shutting out everything else, breathing in her scent and holding her tightly.


	23. Chapter 23 It's a Wild World

**Chapter 23 It's a Wild World**

* * *

_**June, Lake Solitude, Michigan**_

The silence had gone, Dean realised, lying on his back in the shade of the young conifers by the edge of the lake. Insects and birds had returned, there were rustles in the undergrowth that was struggling to compete with the rapidly growing canopies, and he could hear the splash of fish again, jumping in the lake in the soft dusk light.

Behind him, set back under the trees, the small tent held the few possessions they'd been able to salvage, a couple of sleeping bags, some clothing, food and cooking equipment. For the last couple of weeks, he and Alex had slept here, away from the camps and other people. Their days were spent in the rebuilding work, in inventory and assessment, but he didn't want any other company once the sun had set, and the depthless peace of the lake's shore was a balm against the tension of the past few months, and against the little-looked-at knowledge of what was to come.

The planes hadn't taken out the farms surrounding the western camps, and the big truck gardens that Renee and Helen and their teams of willing volunteers had planted had provided the returning army with fresh food, longed for and devoured instantly. Food was not a problem, for once. The weather, holding in a pattern of fine, warm days and cool but not cold nights, was also in their favour, for the moment, reducing the urgency of finding shelter for everyone.

The situation overall, however, was a different matter, he thought, rolling onto his side.

Chitaqua had been destroyed completely. South Farm and Sable almost to the same extent. Tawas and Lake West, protected by Tim and Jo, were mostly intact. Enough so that they could be rebuilt with the salvaged brick and steel and stone they could get, anyway.

There were something over four and a half thousand people here, spread out between the camps, the town and between the three lakes, camping for the most part, a little over a thousand living in the two remaining camps. The town had been devastated and Liev had shaken his head on the question of rebuilding. And thinking about it, Dean realised that with the devil gone, and the attacks on the population likely to become random instead of focussed, it might not be necessary to remain here, to rebuild what had protected them effectively in their time of need. It might be possible to begin spreading out again.

There was still a sizeable population of monsters, he considered, his gaze moving absently down the length of shore, watching Alex as she swam through the cold water. And demons were still around, although they hadn't seen any since Lucifer had gone. That was worrying him. He'd been sure they'd be attacked on the road home, strung out along the highways and mostly defenceless. But there hadn't been a single sighting. He huffed slightly and shoved the train of thought aside.

_If not here, then where?_

The answer came quickly and easily. Kansas. Lebanon had been protected by the archangel's sigil before Baal had passed over and most of the buildings were still intact enough to house a couple hundred of the survivors, with more of the non-perishable materials salvaged from the towns around it. He could be close to the order's library. Bobby and Ellen could return to the order and get out of the live action for a while. Sam and Adam needed to know about it as well, and at the back of his mind, he thought it might be what his brother needed, a time to himself, buried in books and the past. Maybe he would find some of the answers he needed.

He sat up, looking over the smooth, darkening surface of the lake. They could all use a time to themselves, but it didn't seem likely that they'd get it. Death's words, and the vision that had come with them, wouldn't leave him alone. Crowley. He'd never heard of or seen a demon called Crowley. But he – his future self, at least – has spoken to the demon with familiarity. And the sonofabitch had obviously known that Ben was important to him. What did that mean?

A non-fish splash came from his left and he turned his head to watch Alex walking up from the water, the soft mauve and indigo light of the summer twilight tinting her skin as she climbed the sloping beach.

"Look at this," she said, dropping the towel held around her at her feet.

He looked up and smiled appreciatively.

"Not that, here," she said, shaking her head as she smoothed a hand down over her ribs and stomach. She turned around, looking back over her shoulder at him. "And here."

"What?"

"They're all gone, Dean. Every one," she said, turning back and kneeling beside him. "The old ones, as well as the new ones."

He looked more closely at her skin, realising belatedly what she meant. There wasn't a trace of the scars that had criss-crossed her abdomen, or had raked down her back. The skin was smooth and entirely unblemished.

_And intoxicating_, he thought distractedly. He dragged his gaze back to her face.

"Death pulled you back," he said slowly. "Maybe he healed everything, not just the wound in your back."

She nodded, looking down again. "Maybe."

"Looks good to me," he offered, mouth lifting to one side. She glanced up at him, the corners of her mouth tucking in as she took in the expression on his face.

"It does, does it?"

"Yeah," he said, his voice dropping and roughening as he reached out for her. He tasted the lake water on her lips, felt the cold droplets running over his fingers as they slid over her bare skin, the sudden rush of sensation, physical and emotional, that shook through him at the touch of her water-cooled hands.

Driving back from Atlanta, he'd wondered if that first time had been an aberration, an anomaly, brought on by too much tension, too much need. In his memories, it had seemed too much … too … earth-shaking … to be real.

Seemed like it wasn't, he thought, struggling against the same shuddering waves of feeling he remembered, catching at his breath, igniting him, overwhelming him. Each time had been different, but every time held the same power, submersing him in it. Drowning again, he thought, a little incoherently, but not in pain. Every sense was saturated in pleasure, every detail, no matter how small, as sharp and discrete as etched glass. He'd tripped once, a long time ago, in some town he didn't remember with some kids he'd known, even at the time, weren't worth his trouble and the experience came back to him now, the detail he'd seen, the depth of detail. The way her lashes trembled against her cheek, leaping out at him, and sparking a deepening, spreading rush of arousal for no apparent reason; smell and taste and sound and sight so intensely felt that he couldn't separate them, couldn't separate the involuntary moans he felt in his own chest, humming against the inside of his lips, from those he could hear from her, breathed against his skin.

It'd never been safe to let go completely, to show everything, to _feel_ everything. He'd always held back, finding it easier to give than to take, more comfortable with control than surrender; physically satisfied, the feelings he hid from, pretended weren't there, didn't exist, left an emptiness long afterwards.

Until now.

* * *

Alex curled against the warmth of his body, feeling the aftershocks skitter along her nerve endings, the diminishing tingle still with the power to fill her breasts with a restless ache. Under her cheek, she listened to his heart slowing, settling into a steady beat.

It wasn't enough, she thought with a touch of self-deprecation, that he was the unofficial leader of the free world? He had to be able to light her from end to end as well? Beneath the slightly dry self-mockery, the thought covered up something else, she knew, something she didn't want to think of too often, couldn't fathom readily when she looked at it.

The awkward and often clumsy and fumbling attempts in college and the brief period at the beginning of her marriage had been the sum total of her sexual experience. None of it had prepared her for what happened with the man lying next to her. None of it could even be considered in the same realm, she thought, with a flutter of nervousness. Not one of the partners she'd had had found the places that he'd found in her, or awoken a depth of desire that made every touch, every caress or kiss or look reach in so deeply and fill her with a desperate need to be closer, to give herself up without reservation or doubt.

It would've frightened her, those feelings, if she hadn't known him, she thought. But then, if she hadn't known him, she had the feeling she wouldn't have felt the way she did. Was it that simple? Was it that simple for him?

She sighed very softly.

* * *

Feeling the exhalation against his skin, Dean moved a little, shifting his position to look down at her. "What?"

"I was just wondering if we'll have the time to rebuild what we lost," she said, tilting her head to look up at him. "With what Death told you, I mean."

He looked at the sky above them, black and thick with millions of stars. In the old world, had he ever seen a sky quite so thick with stars, he wondered absently as he turned over what she'd asked and how to answer. He couldn't remember, but he didn't think so. There'd been no time-line on the entity's prophesising. He knew what the end result was supposed to be … but how he was going to get to that point, he had no idea. Jerome and Bobby had reached a rare moment of accord when he'd told him what the entity had said. They were going to turn the order's libraries, in Lebanon and the other chapters, inside out to figure it out.

"Yeah, we'll have time," he said finally, his arm tightening around her a little more closely, hoping that was the truth. "And this time, we've got a lot more info, we can make sure that however we do it, it's secure."

That, at least, was the truth. The order's library had reams of information on protection, on guards and wards and sigils to keep the population safe from anything bar a full-scale armed assault. And between Franklin and Mel, he thought even an assault would have a hard time getting through. He felt the lift of her cheek against his skin.

"It's not a secure world, anymore, Dean," she said lightly. "Maybe it never was."

"No, it's not," he agreed, only a little reluctantly. "But we'll still do whatever we can."

"Do you want to stay here?"

"I was thinking that, maybe, we could get closer to Lebanon," he said, rolling onto his side and propping his head against his hand as he looked at her. "There are a lot of us here."

"Kansas has good farm country," she said slowly, lips curving up at him as she watched his expression brighten. "Better now that it's had a couple of years rest. Not to mention a power station that's still active."

"Right," he said, with an answering grin. It never failed to surprise him, her ability to jump along with his thoughts, see what he saw. He'd only recently realised that he'd come to rely on that ability, though with hindsight, he knew he'd been relying on it for a long time now.

"Do we have enough people who'd go there?" he asked, his mind already ticking ahead to the logistics and details.

"We're almost finished with the census and info-gathering," she said. "I might be able to give you an answer in a few days. I think a lot of the people here will want to go, start again without being constantly reminded of what happened."

He could just see her expression in the starlight, thoughtful as she considered the people she'd interviewed and talked to through the past couple of weeks. He'd found himself trusting her objectivity on the assessments of those now under his protection.

In a lot of ways, she was still an enigma to him, he thought, studying her features in the faint light. They'd talked here, a little, of the things that had happened to her, and the things that had happened to him. He'd told her about Sam. And Adam. And what Death had shown him, when he'd been negotiating for her life. She'd listened, not just to the words, he thought, but to everything that he hadn't said out loud. Getting her to talk about her past had been harder, and he'd seen the bone-deep doubt and fears that still lingered, not sure how to allay them, or to convince her that nothing she'd done had brought it on. He thought it would take time, to banish those. Time he'd now have. Time for the both of them.

"If I go to Kansas, will you come with me?"

Alex turned to look up at him, her expression a little quizzical. "Do you want that?"

His gaze cut away for a second, the habit of a lifetime to hide the things he thought of as weaknesses, then he snorted softly, ducking his head to brush his mouth over hers.

"Well, I can't leave you here alone," he said, his tone disparaging as he looked at her. "Last time I left you alone, you almost got yourself killed. You think I can tell Death what to do every time that happens?"

He felt the silent huff of laugher against his shoulder. "Guess I'll just have to stay close then."

"Yeah, safer that way," he said, lying back against the grass behind him, relaxing as relief trickled through him. He trusted her, maybe more than anyone else. She knew it all and she hadn't turned away. He wanted her with him, for more reasons than he'd been able to look at, or admit to. When she was near, the weight on him just lifted and he could breathe again. For the moment, that was all he needed to know.

* * *

_**Camp Tawas, Lake Tawas, Michigan. One week later.**_

The hall was packed with people and Alex smiled wearily up at the young woman in front of her as she looked over the form dropped onto the table. In her mid-twenties, Rebecca Arkhorn was tall and slender, with long, dark hair framing an oval face and dark blue eyes, filled with an understanding of how tedious this process was for everyone concerned.

"Rebecca?"

The woman nodded and the occupation she'd written down caught Alex's eye. "You were a teacher?"

"Yes, ma'am," Rebecca said, her voice soft and light with the slight drawl of the Midwest. "Grade school. I work – worked – was working in Ohio when the virus hit."

"Not ma'am, not here, just Alex, please," Alex told her, putting the form to one side. "We've got a lot of kids and not many teachers. Do you know if you'd like to stay here, or move to the Kansas camps?"

"I grew up in Topeka," Rebecca said, looking up and past Alex. "I'd like to go back to Kansas."

"Good," Dean said, walking up behind Alex's chair and looking over her head at the young teacher. "Buses'll be leaving in two weeks, see Renee," he told her, gesturing to the other side of the hall.

Rebecca nodded and turned away and Alex swivelled in the chair, looking up at the man standing behind her.

"You done here?" he asked her. She gave him a wry smile and glanced around the packed room.

"What do you think?"

"We should get going," he said, turning to lean against the table. "Long drive."

"This is going to take another couple of days, at least," Alex said. "And I need to stay, need to get to know the people who're going to be coming, need to get the numbers so that we can figure out the accommodation and food."

He frowned. "Can't someone else do it?"

She smiled at his expression. "Probably, but that's not the point, is it?"

He looked away, brows drawn together. She was right. He needed accurate figures and he needed someone who was shrewd and observant and had a feel for people. She could tell him about the people who would be following them to Kansas. The fact was, Alex was the best person to give him both. Didn't mean he had to like it, he thought mulishly.

Coming back from Atlanta, when they'd driven along the old highway from East Tawas toward the lake, seen the smoke rising and the craters and the rubble of the destroyed buildings, he'd only been able to think of one thing. It'd taken everything he'd had, every last scrap of control he was capable of, to keep that held down so that he could think and do what he had to.

He looked back to her, aware that he'd been silent for too long. "How are you going to get over?"

"Rufus said he'll be going in a few days," she said. "I'll get a ride with him. Are you taking Sam and Adam with you?"

"Yeah." He shrugged, mouth twisting up in a humourless grin. "Jerome'll be thrilled to see two more Winchesters."

Alex snorted and shuffled through the pile of the forms on the table, pulling out four. "I think he'll need to check out these people as well," she said, handing them to him. "You should make sure they go with you."

He looked through the forms, brows rising as he took in their details. A Jesuit priest. An anthropologist. A professor of dead languages. An archaeologist. He looked back at her.

"Yeah, okay, the geeks I get, but the priest?"

"You'll see when you meet him," she told him, smiling at his expression. "He's very interesting."

* * *

Dean glanced at Sam, sitting hunched up in the corner of the seat as he pulled out through the gates of Tawas and turned right. His brother looked better physically, catching up on food and rest over the last couple of weeks, but not much improved otherwise. Behind him, Adam too was silent and taciturn, looking out the window with a morose expression.

_Good times_, Dean thought with an inward shrug. He reached for the stereo and pushed the tape in, keeping the volume at a reasonable level as he hit the Twenty-Three, heading south, his thoughts darting randomly between the events of the weeks just gone by and his tentative ideas of what was to come.

Behind him, another eight vehicles; Army carriers and trucks and three buses, followed the black car along the pitted highway. Liev and Matt, Vincent, Maurice and Mel, the four Alex had recommended, Jesuit priest and three academics whose specialities had tagged them for the society's library, two dozen more builders, farmers and trades people rode in them, moving from Michigan to set up the new compounds on the land surrounding Lebanon. The little town at the centre of the continental United States was surrounded by farmland. Good farmland, Alex had said. To the north, Nebraska's border was less than twenty miles. To the east and west, they could scavenge from the small towns and build around the hamlet. Liev was already buzzing with ideas for protection and defence, sitting hunched over in the back of the Army troop carrier with Matt and working out ways to maximise the accommodation while minimising the needed materials on scraps of paper.

A little under two thousand people had been killed in the attack on the camp. It was a number Dean couldn't let go. Most had been crushed in their homes, hadn't had the time to get out when the sirens had sounded and the planes had barrelled overhead, dropping their bombs and filling the air with the heavy calibre bullets of their guns. Renee had told him about Tim and Jo, scrambling for the gun towers and taking out the planes as they'd approached for their second run. They'd only missed one, but that one had hit Chitaqua twice, being taken down over the lake when it had banked for the third pass.

The mass graves had been dug in the last week of May. And the bodies had been burned within their confines. What part of destiny had decreed those deaths, he wondered sourly? What were they supposed to push? To drive forward? They'd lost people whose skills were irreplaceable. Lost people who'd been cared for and had cared for others. His fingers curled around the wheel and he shoved those thoughts out of his head because they only brought anger and he needed to be cool. Think of the survivors, he told himself firmly. _Think of everyone who needs you now_.

It'd come as a surprise when everyone had approved of his idea to relocate about half the population to Kansas, as soon as the town could be fortified.

"_So, who's staying and who's going?" Bobby had asked him a week ago. They'd gotten everyone together to figure that one out._

"_Good country," Dave had confirmed, glancing at his small group of experienced farmers. Jackson Darrow, grizzled and seamed in his late fifties, Kenny Hawes, tall and dark with a crooked, lady-killing smile, and Riley Warren, a man of very few words, lean and rangy and tanned, had agreed._

Dave and Kenny were staying, to run the big landholdings they'd developed west of Tawas and train more young people to farm. He hadn't been surprised when they'd told him. They'd worked hard on the farms there, put their sweat and blood into the soils and neither man wanted to go elsewhere. Jackson and Riley were happy to move west and south, both men having farmed the mid-west in their previous lives. Between them and the couple of hundred volunteers Alex had gathered for the migration, experienced and not, they would be able to get a lot of land under cultivation once they'd located the machinery and set up some rudimentary housing.

"_What about livestock?" Riley had looked at Dave. The camps had lost about half of their hard-won livestock to the aerial attack, those animals who'd been still in the barns. They hadn't seen any other livestock since the Angel of the Abyss had passed over._

"_We'll send out breeding stock, fertilised. Rotate the bloodlines as much as we can with what we've got," Dave had said, with a helpless shrug. "Hope we find more."_

_Alex had explained later. There were only fourteen male bulls and a dozen rams in the herds that had survived. And of those, only eight bulls and seven rams were definitely unrelated. It wouldn't be enough to stop inbreeding, down the line, without other sources. She'd told him that she thought the genetics would probably start to falter in twenty or thirty yeas if they couldn't find more._

Boze and Renee were staying at Tawas. Sean would stay there as well, at least for a while, to train people in hunting, to take the teams out to look for any survivors. Bobby and Ellen would be returning to Kansas but Jo was staying at Lake West. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she held the confidence of everyone there and she and Ty had been voted as leaders unanimously by those staying on. Franklin was staying for a while till the defences were once again sound.

Ellen wasn't particularly happy about it, but she seemed to have realised that her little girl had finally grown up, was capable of living a life on her own, hunting or not, and she'd seen Jo with Ty, the young hunter's devotion obvious and reassuring.

Rufus would come out, but Dominique was remaining at Tawas. He wondered how that was going to work out for the old man and shrugged the thought off. Rufus had been on his own for a very long time. He'd figure out what he needed.

"So, this place," Adam said from the back seat, catching his gaze in the rearview mirror and dragging his thoughts back to the present. "It's a secret society?"

Dean nodded. "They specialised in finding knowledge and sorting out myth from truth. Started back when the pharaohs were big, apparently."

He heard the young man's soft snort behind him.

"And we're supposed to be related to it somehow?"

"Yeah, somehow," Dean hedged, looking at the road. "Our paternal grandfather was a part of it."

"What makes you think I have any interest in any part of this family, Dean?"

"Nothing," Dean snapped, tired of the anger he could hear in his half-brother's voice. "But you got nothing better to do right now, so you might as well learn something about where you came from. It might not be all that bad."

Adam stiffened against the seat at the rebuke and turned to look out the window.

Dean felt Sam's gaze on him and he glanced sideways. Sam shook his head slightly and turned away. Leaning forward, Dean's fingers found the volume control and turned it up. He wasn't getting paid for this shit.

* * *

Renee looked around the big room, finally emptied of the civilians and survivors, blinking as the lights came on, dispelling the early evening gloom. She got to her feet, stretching her back and shoulders tiredly and walked over to Alex and Chuck, smiling ruefully at them.

"All done?"

"Finally," Chuck said, rubbing at the back of his neck. "Got a list of preferences here."

"What about the supplies, Alex?"

"Tawas and Lake West have what we salvaged from the stores and basements of Chitaqua and Sable. The food stored in South Farms has been sent on to Lebanon. As staples go, it's reasonable. You'll have more than enough to feed the populations that are staying right through the winter, especially if more of the wildlife comes south, and there's no reason to think they won't. Sheri told me she saw more than a hundred white-tail along the highway, to the west of Lake Tawas, yesterday morning. They were feeding in the flats by the river, all looking fat and healthy. And she thought the caribou might come south this year, since there's precious little competition and virtually no hunters. There was supposed to be a big population on the other side, before the virus."

"Well, venison used to be a gourmet treat, didn't it?" Renee smiled, sitting down at the table. "What about the people who go to Kansas?"

"There's a slightly longer growing season there," Alex said. "Dean was in contact this morning and he said that Jackson and Riley have already planted out a dozen truck gardens in the farmland on the eastern side of town. They've taken about a third of the seed that Dave had been collecting, but they'll be able to save their own this fall. I think if they get the summer barley and oats in this week, we might just squeak through, enough to feed the stock and replant next spring."

"What about wildlife there?" Chuck asked her curiously. "Anything spotted?"

She shook her head. "No, we might send some teams up here, or just work out a trade with you guys for fresh meat and skins. No one's found any factory or warehouses with intact fabrics, not in Detroit, not even in Wichita, although that must have been protected from the plagues."

"Taking your spinning and weaving library?" Renee asked, one brow lifted.

Alex's mouth twisted up. "Yeah, definitely," she said. "And textile production has been added to the education requirements, along with skinning, tanning and leatherwork. We might be able to get some of the textile factories working, with a power station, but a lot of the newer ones were computer-controlled and I haven't come across anyone who claims knowledge of them."

"You know, the lake country to the north will have a lot of wild birds back by now. We can send out teams to get them for food and the feathers," Chuck offered, looking from one woman to the other. "I'd kill for a featherdown quilt instead of blankets," he added wistfully. "And a feather pillow."

"Good point," Renee said, her head tilting slightly as she thought about it. "I'll talk to Sean, he's been itching to get back to the wilderness. He could take a training team at the same time."

"Sounds like a plan," Alex agreed readily. She looked at them. "We've got quite a few technicians in the group that came up from Atlanta," she said slowly. "I don't know if they're going to be able to get the power on here, but we might have more success with that in Kansas – Liev told me that Wolf Creek is still running."

"Franklin brought in a flat bed of generators from Grand Rapids," Renee said, gesturing vaguely to the compound outside. "Gennies will do us until we can spare the people to go and look for solar panels and batteries. Fuel is still easy enough to get."

Alex nodded. "Once we really start spreading out, we'll need to think about getting more power stations running."

Chuck looked at her, his forehead wrinkling in concern. "Fast track through the Industrial Revolution and put us all right back on the old path?"

"Cynical," she said to him, smiling slightly. "No, hopefully not. But power means help in a lot of ways. The tools and machines we use for building, things that once needed a big population of labourers we can do with a few people now. And spread out so thinly, all around the world, power means communication. Communication we can't live without."

He looked away, nodding as he got up from the table. "I don't want to see things go back to the way they were. It was a hive-mentality that we can do without."

"None of us do," Renee agreed softly. "I think Lucifer had it easy the way it was."

Chuck looked away and shook his head. "Well, you ladies might be full of energy, but I've had it," he said, gesturing to the door. "I'll see you in the morning."

She turned and looked at Alex as Chuck walked out of the hall, heading for the stairs. "What time are you heading out?"

"Whenever Rufus is ready, I guess." Alex hid a yawn behind her hand. "He said something about tomorrow. Chuck's coming with us, you knew that?"

Renee sighed. "Yeah. He's wanted to get back to that library for the last two weeks. It was good of him to come and help us with the extra people." She looked back at Alex. "Gonna miss having you around, you know."

"It's not that far," Alex said, smiling. "And you're going to be too busy to notice in another few months."

"You and Dean, you'll come back for the wedding?"

"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Alex promised, wondering if Dean would be able to make it. They would be back and forth a fair amount over the next few months.

"Alex," Renee said, hesitating for a moment. "The next few months, at least, we're not – there's nothing that's likely to happen, is there?"

Alex looked at her questioningly. "Not that anyone's told me. Jerome says everything's pretty quiet. And even with what Death told Dean – they're still looking for references, they haven't found anything yet. And we haven't seen any signs of demons – or even monsters for that matter."

Renee nodded, her expression relieved. "Good. We need a time of rest."

* * *

_**I-80 W, Kansas**_

Rufus looked across as Alex shifted in the seat beside him, stretching out her legs awkwardly to one side. Beyond her, next to the window, Chuck was hunched into the corner, his jacket drawn over his shoulder, eyes closed.

"Got about another three hours," Rufus said softly to her.

"Just enough time to seize up completely," she agreed, trying to stretch without disturbing the man sleeping next to her.

"Gettin' soft now, Alex?"

She made a face at him. "Contortionism, never been one of my strengths."

"Could've fooled me," he said, smiling a little.

She lifted a brow quizzically at him.

"Took you long enough to unbend and notice what was right in front of you," he clarified with half-smile, catching the look from the corner of his eye.

"That wasn't –" she stopped, and looked out through the windshield. "Why aren't you staying with Dom?"

He snorted quietly at the abrupt change of subject. "Too old. Too set in my ways."

"I don't believe that," she said, looking at him.

He glanced at her, shrugging. "Believe it or not, it's the truth. Dom's still young. We want different things."

"So it's over?"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "Not exactly. She wants to stay in Tawas, she's found her place there. I'll see her, when I go back."

He'd told her about his family. Told her about the price he'd paid. Alex looked at him. She didn't think it was the old fear of losing them that was driving the decision. She'd had the impression that Rufus had mostly made his peace with that. Dom was stubborn. So was he. And maybe this suited both of them.

"Did Ben go out with Dean?" she asked, pulling in a deep breath.

Rufus nodded. "Yeah. Dean could see he needed someone after Duncan and Alanna died."

"Dean needs it too," Alex said, moving over a little to lean against the hunter's shoulder.

Rufus looked down at her. "What makes you say that?"

"Dean's the only father Ben has," she said. "And he needs that, sometimes I think even more than Ben does."

"That doesn't bother you?"

She turned her head to look at him, her eyes wide. "No, of course not, why would it?"

He shook his head. "Someone else's kid?"

"Ben is Ben," she said. "Dean told you what Death showed him, didn't he?"

Rufus sighed. "Yeah, he told me."

"He can't let that happen," she said. "He needs people, Rufus, needs to care about them, needs them to care about him."

Rufus' mouth compressed a little. Dean had told him that the vision Death had showed him had scared the hell out of him, had showed him how close he could come to crossing the line between human and monster. He knew that the younger man did need people. Needed friends. Needed someone at his back. Those would keep him anchored, keep him in the here and now. But it was the woman sitting beside him that made the difference in the man, he thought. Gave him back his hope and would be the stopper to him ever crossing that line. He wondered if Alex knew that. Sometimes, it didn't seem like she did.

Chuck opened bleary, sleep-rimmed eyes and looked around. "We there yet?"

* * *

_**Lebanon, Kansas**_

Sam sat at the polished wooden table, looking at the piles of books surrounding him, his head resting against his hand. There were supposed to be answers here. That's what Dean had told him. Answers to what had happened. Answers to what he'd become. He couldn't find them.

"It's Sam, isn't it?" The warm, tenor voice beside him held a trace of a Spanish accent, in the lilt and the sibilants. He looked up.

"My name is Father Emilio," the priest said, extending a hand to him. He was tall and lean, the soft brown robe hiding the frame beneath it, but the bones of the face clear under the olive skin. Dark brown eyes reflected the smile on the wide, mobile mouth.

"Yeah, uh …" Sam said, straightening in his chair and shaking the offered hand. "You're a priest?"

"As you can see," Father Emilio's smile widened a little further.

"Didn't think a priest would be … uh … here." Sam looked around the library, at the shelves packed with books and texts and manuscripts describing supernatural lore and myth and legend. A large section of the library on the floor below held heretical texts.

"Knowledge is the only currency worth pursuing," the man said, sitting down beside him. "And to be able to truly serve God, one must read not one book, but a thousand, or better still, a million."

Sam's brow wrinkled up. "That's, uh, an interesting viewpoint."

"A balanced view is the only hope of self-knowledge. This, surely, you have heard?"

Another interesting viewpoint, Sam thought. Not one that he'd heard much from the ecclesiastical servants he'd met. Although, he considered, Jim Murphy had been an honest man, honest with himself.

"I'm not really in need of saving, Father," Sam said uncomfortably.

Father Emilio made a small noise in his throat. "I apologise, Sam. Saving you was not my intent."

"It isn't?"

The priest gestured vaguely in the direction of the situation room. "Your brother told me you are a scholar," he said. "I came to ask for your help."

Sam looked down at the books piled around him. "Oh. Uh, sure. What are you looking for?"

* * *

The little town had been transformed and Rufus, Chuck and Alex stared around them as they drove through.

Every house that had been built of timber had gone, of course. The few brick buildings that had remained had been expanded and rebuilt, the streets filled with low-loaders and flat-beds, loaded with brick and stone and steel frame.

"They have been busy," Chuck breathed, looking at the reinforced buildings, at the outer curtain wall that was thirty feet high, almost seven foot thick, the space between the inner and outer courses filled with layers of salt and iron, concrete and rubble.

Rufus stopped the truck beside the half-built frame of what would be a very large building, seeing Liev standing by one of the walls, the stocky, dark-haired builder arguing with another man.

They got out of the truck, stretching their legs as they looked around. Liev caught sight of them and turned, throwing a last order over his shoulder as he walked toward them.

"You building castles now, Liev?" Rufus asked, looking up at the frame towering above them.

"Kind of," the builder grinned, looking around at the framing surrounding them. "This'll be a central Keep, we were thinking about how to get everyone safe – oh hell, c'mon, it's easier to show you the blueprints."

He turned around and hurried back to the shelter of the building, and they followed him. Behind the wall that was rapidly rising on the eastern side, a broad, stone-flagged room held a long set of trestle tables, covered with plans and drawings and maps.

"Here," Liev said, pointing to the detailed map of the town. "This will hold what we need. We've dug tunnels, from here and," he paused, moving to another plan. "And here. There'll be four strongholds, circling the town, taking in about a thousand acres of land for each, across the rivers. All water piped in –"

"You've already tapped into the power?" Alex looked up at the lights and around at the men and women using electric tools, her gaze returning to Liev.

"Yeah, Wolf Creek was on standby and we got about a dozen towns going," he said, gesturing vaguely around. "The lines go up into Nebraska, so we've got a lot of room to expand if we need to. And here, all mod cons."

"How long till we can move the people over?" Rufus asked, looking down at the maps. The fortified holdings were a mile distant from the town centre, a little more or a little less. The town itself had been surrounded by the thick wall, with some kind of buildings going up around the inside edge of it, and more being built against the inner walls. It was definitely a castle set up, he thought, digging through his memories for the names of those inner courtyards. Had it been baileys? Or was it a redoubt?

"We can take another thousand right now, if they don't mind camping out for a few weeks," Liev said, tapping the plans in front of him. "These two have power and water, the inner and outer walls are done."

"How'd you get this done so fast?" Alex looked at him quizzically. "I thought we might be okay for winter, but this …" she trailed off as she looked around at the thick steel frames, dozens of men and women swarming over them, the ring of metal on metal filling her ears.

"We've got a good sized workforce here. Took me four hours of arguing with Dean and Bobby, but we need the numbers," Liev explained, his expression slightly pained with the memory. "And more machinery here than you could credit – one thing to be said about farm country, they do like their heavy earth-movers."

Chuck leaned over the map. "What about the farms? Will they feed two thousand over the next twelve months? And the stock?"

"You'll have to talk to Jackson about that," Liev answered, turning slightly as he saw his foreman coming back in. "He's down the road toward the Order's place, about a mile. Used to be a used-car yard and he painted it orange. You can't miss it."

Rufus stepped back as Micah stopped beside Liev and turned away, looking from Chuck to Alex. "You want to get to the library?"

Chuck nodded and Alex shrugged. There wasn't much more they'd find out here, at least not right now.

* * *

_**July, Lebanon, Kansas**_

Adam walked down to the river's edge and sat down in the shade of the young oak. The day was cloudless and still, but there was a line of murky shadow to the south and people had been talking of a storm later. For the moment, though, the countryside couldn't have been more bucolic.

He leaned back against the trunk and watched the sunshine scattering as it touched the restless water in front of him, his thoughts churning.

The angels had told him he'd been pulled from Heaven. He didn't remember that. He didn't remember much of being bound and gagged by the archangel who'd taken over his body, or what had happened over that period of time either. Dumped on a football field, surrounded by people he didn't know and didn't want to know, he was getting sick of trying to play catch up.

His so-called family were worse. They'd filled in a lot of the gaps in his father's life, enough so that he'd been finally able to match up what was missing with what had happened in his past. Dean had barely been able to get any of it out. Sam had been more forthcoming, but hadn't known as much about their father as he suspected his oldest brother did.

And it hadn't helped. Not really. John Winchester might have been trying to do the best for his sons, but he'd failed spectacularly on most counts. He couldn't pretend that the memories of his childhood hadn't happened. Couldn't pretend that the hurts of those years didn't still exist in his heart. Sam had derisively told him that the only thing worse than not having his father around more than once a year was having him around all year. He'd heard the bitter edge to the comment, and had been unable to respond. No matter what their lives had been like, they'd had a father through it all. He hadn't. And it was as simple as that, in the end.

And now he was supposed to become the thing that his father had kept himself distant to prevent. Hunting 101. He wondered if John Winchester could see them all now, see the mess he'd left them with, the way it'd turned his good intentions into an expressway to Hell.

* * *

"_Let death take my enemies by surprise; let them go down alive to the realm of the dead, for evil finds lodging among them_."

Bobby turned around and looked up at Father Emilio, standing behind him.

"You got any ideas on how we're supposed to find this prophet, padre, don't hold back," he answered sourly. "I'd be happy enough to take Hell by surprise."

The priest moved to the chair beside him and sat down. "Jerome said you found a single account, in Syria?"

Bobby nodded tiredly, closing the book in front of him. "And nothing else, yeah."

"There was a prophet, name Isaiah, who walked the deserts of Syria and Jordan in the fourth century. He is mentioned in the heretical texts from an account of his encounter with Matathias, the so-called –"

"Wandering Jew," Bobby said. "Yeah, I've heard that one. This prophet met him in the desert?"

"That's the account."

"An' who wrote the account?" Bobby asked sceptically. "Since neither the prophet nor Matathias seemed to be much for leaving accounts of themselves?"

Father Emilio inclined his head in acknowledgement. "This is true, but with the prophet on this day was a soldier, and it was he who recounted the meeting, and told the story to his commander when he returned."

"Got it handy?"

The priest nodded. "It is with the Church texts, I can show you."

Bobby got to his feet and followed the priest out of the library. "A priest, living in Atlanta, with the devil in residence … Father, I gotta ask how you managed to survive there?"

"The devil had other things on his mind," Father Emilio said quietly, taking the stairs at the end of the hall downward. "There were several occasions I thought I'd been found, but something happened, each one of those times, and I remained undiscovered."

"Lucky," Bobby remarked dryly. Father Emilio stopped and turned back to look up at the old hunter.

"Luck had nothing to do with it," he said, his face creasing up in a smile. "I have my task to complete on earth, as do we all. I was only saved to that purpose."

Bobby looked down at him, wondering briefly at the strength of the man's faith in view of the lack of God's help over past few years.

"You have to learn to see His hand in the little things, my friend, not just the large," Father Emilio said, as if he'd heard the hunter's thoughts spoken aloud. "We would not be here if it had not been so willed, and we cannot succeed without Him with us."

"I'll take any help I can get," Bobby acceded readily, although he'd trust to the men here before he waited on anything else.

"Good," Father Emilio said, turning and walking down again. "He won't help those who sit and wait for it."

Bobby smiled wryly at that.

They descended three levels, to the lowest of the library levels in the building, and Father Emilio walked along the hall to the large room at the end.

"These texts and manuscripts are some of the ones the Church has rejected, over time," he said, moving through the stacks to the end of the room. "For one reason or another."

"Didn't fit in with what they wanted to say?"

"Even so."

"How do you reconcile that?" Bobby asked him curiously, looking at the shelves. There were hundreds of texts here, probably thousands.

"My vows belong to an order that believes that truth must be discerned in all things, if one is to truly serve God's purposes," Father Emilio said, bending slightly as he searched along the shelf for the book he wanted. "These writings, the Bible, the canonical and heretical texts, they were all written by men." He stopped, drawing out a thick, hand-bound book and looking back at Bobby. "And men have ever had their own opinions, realised or not, expressed or not, that taint their views, their translations and interpretations."

"Hard not to when the source material is from a burning bush," Bobby suggested diplomatically. The priest's teeth flashed white against the tanned skin.

"There is that," he agreed. "But an historian does not study one source when attempting to recreate the past. Nor the archaeologist. Many, many sources must be looked at, analysed, reviewed, before one can come to an understanding that may approach the truth."

He held out the book to the hunter. "This is the account. It was discovered in Constantinople when the First Arab Siege of that city failed in 678. The documents, held in the summer palace in the mountains to the north, were taken back to Rome when the Caliphate withdrew its forces."

Bobby took it, flipping through the pages and sighing as he realised he was going to be reading it in Arabic. "Anything else to support it?"

"Not that I have found so far," Father Emilio said, apologetically spreading his hands. "I am searching the period, and the area."

"I'll check it out," Bobby said, sighing. "If there is something, about the demons, would it be in the Church records?"

"Possibly," the priest admitted. "But if it is dangerous, or extremely heretical, or something that the Church was determined to keep hidden, it wouldn't be in this country. It would be hidden in the vaults, below the Basilica of Saint Peter."

"You're talking about the Vatican?"

"Yes." Father Emilio nodded. "And I cannot think of a way to get there, not now."

* * *

Alex sat on the open tail gate of the pickup, listening to the man beside her as he talked about the crops they'd sewn, her head bent as she made notes. The sunshine was hot on her back and the breeze had died earlier in the morning, the humidity building slowly as the afternoon progressed.

Jackson turned to look at her as she wrote. "You gonna take me down word-for-word?"

She lifted her head, smiling and shaking her head. "Just the figures, Jackson. What are our chances of cotton here?"

"Without the upland seed? Zilch." The farmer looked at the patchwork of fields they could see surrounding them. "There'll be cotton, in Oklahoma, in Texas, but we'll have to go get it, not gonna have much luck growing it here."

"Flax? Hemp?"

"So long as no one gets carried away an' starts smoking it," he said, tilting his head to look back at her, the sunlight glinting off the thinning silver hair he wore very short. "You thinking cordage or fabrics?"

"For the flax, fabric. Linen is a strong, stable fabric and not difficult to weave. Especially if we can't get hold of cotton," she said, closing her notebook and sliding off the tail gate. "But yeah, rope from the hemp. We haven't found anyone who worked in the synthetic industries and I don't even know if we're going to be able to get those going again, even if we can run power to them."

He shrugged. "Managed without them for a long time."

"What's the story on harvesting cotton, if any should happen to reseed itself in the south?"

"Labour and more labour," he told her bluntly. "Harvesting shouldn't be a problem, if the plagues didn't affect the machines. But the harvesting is the least of it, Alex. We need the gins going, we need people to run them, we need the mills to spin the thread."

"We can do some spinning here," she countered slowly.

"Not enough to make it worthwhile. And it'd be more labour-intensive than the other way, anyhow," he said. "You tell Dean or Bobby to send some folks down, there'll be a few of the Atlanta people who'll know what they're doing, see if those gins survived, see if the mills did. Then we can talk about going down and harvesting."

She sighed and nodded. "You're gonna miss your jeans when they wear out," she said dryly, looking at the tough pants he was wearing.

"Oh yeah, think we're gonna be missing a lot of things, by and by, as we use 'em up," he agreed. "Just have to think of other things we can use instead. My daddy used to swear by wool, said it kept him warm in the winter and cool in the summer."

Alex nodded. Her grandmother had said the same thing. It stretched and shrank and needed care with washing but it was easy to repair, at least, when the cloth was woven tightly.

They both turned at the low rumble of a car coming along the dirt road, lifting billowing clouds of dust as it slowed down.

"Your ride?" Jackson asked with a grin.

"Think so," she said, tucking her notebook under her arm. "Have you and Riley got enough people? I know we're cutting it fine this year."

"We're good," Jackson said as the black car, coated in fine, grey dust, pulled over behind the pickup. "Rain hasn't really stopped, and well, you know what everything's growing like. We'll need some help, come the end of summer, with getting everything in and stored, but we'll feed ourselves, and the stock. Soil's good from lying fallow for a couple of years."

"The holdings should be pretty much filled by then," she said, walking with him over to the car. "I think you'll have plenty of volunteers."

"Need folks who can handle the machines, mostly," he said. "Chuck gave me a list, but I haven't had the time to go round doing damned interviews."

Alex frowned. "Tricia and Davis can shortlist those for you. They're supposed to be helping out with sorting out job allocations anyway."

"I'll take the list over, first thing," he assured her as she got into the car, closing the door and rapping his knuckles on the roof.

Dean nodded as he waited for the farmer to clear his turning circle, glancing at Alex as the tyres spat out another rooster-tail of dust behind them.

"Tell me you got good news," he said.

"Not bad news, at any rate," she said, leaning back against the seat and flipping down the visor to cut the sunshine from her face. "Food will be fine, both for us and the stock. We'll need to think about some specialised teams to head south if we want cotton again. And come harvest-time, we'd better hope that Liev and Terry have finished enough of the holds so that we can get a good workforce here." She turned to look at him, seeing the set of his jaw as he accelerated. "Why, what happened to you?"

"People keep trying to turn me into some kind of desk jockey," he said darkly, flicking a look at her when she remained silent. "It's not funny."

"No, it's not," Alex said, dragging in a breath to cover the laughter that was still fizzing slightly at his expression. "But, you know, it's kind of the B side to being able to pull an army that will actually follow you into a battle."

"I didn't –"

"Yeah, you did," she cut him off gently. "Who's responsible for forcing you into paperwork now?"

"Ellen," he said, his voice rising aggrievedly. "Liev. Maurice. Chuck – Chuck!"

And that would be why he'd come looking for her, she thought. Ellen needed a decision on how the library contingent were going to be fed. Liev wanted approvals on the next two compounds, each designed to hold nearly five hundred people, and he wanted Dean to make a decision on where he was going to live. Maurice was itching to look for more survivors and start training more hunters and there weren't enough of the older, more experienced hunters to go round, not here, not in Michigan either. Chuck … she couldn't imagine what Chuck wanted.

"What did Chuck want?"

"He wants a team to get down to Wichita and pick up some optical drives – said he and this kid he found in Tawas are going to put the library's information into a database or something."

"Do we have enough people to make a run like that?"

Maurice and Vincent had taken a run down to the small city before they'd brought Liev and Matt over. The power had been restored, probably right after their attack, and it had been protected, the sigil of Gabriel had been across everything, but the city was empty with no sign of the free civilians who'd been living there, or any survivors of Baal's passes across the country.

"Yeah, Rufus and Vince'll have their … trainees starting in a couple of weeks," he said, mouth quirking up a little. "One of them could go down there, take a team, scout it out and get whatever is left there."

He let out a breath and felt his fingers loosen on the wheel. The weight was lifting, and she hadn't done a single thing but listen. "Where do you want to live?"

"I thought you wanted to stay in the library?"

"With Bobby and Ellen? And Sam?" he asked, shaking his head. "No. Besides, they've got a pretty full house there now."

The order's accommodations were full. In addition to Jerome, Aaron, Oliver and Marla, Sam and Chuck had moved in along with the three specialists and Bobby and Ellen had taken over their old quarters there.

"It'll have to be in town, won't it? Or the keep, or whatever Liev is calling the compound?"

He glanced at her and nodded. Everyone had been pretty unanimous on that. He was supposed to stay central. Available. The thought made him squirm.

The builder had enclosed the entire town in walls, an outer curtain wall that was actually two, with the battlements between, two keeps, towers on all four corners, eight baileys, four upper, four lower with inner curtain walls that were also doubled and held long, narrow passages inside for defence in the seemingly impossible event that the outer defences were breached … the town had disappeared pretty much, and the castle that had taken its place could house four hundred – craftsmen and schools and hunters and their families – Liev had told him, bright-eyed.

He'd been astonished by the speed at which the building had gone up, even with the extra labour. Matt had told him it was mostly due to the modern materials and the ease of framing that it had all been so quick.

Four more castles were in the last stages of being built, their outer walls poured concrete and tons of the rubble from the towns and farms that had been destroyed, the inner constructions steel frames over stone foundations, and they were larger than the central town castle, designed to hold the hundreds of people needed to work the farmland in every direction.

"There's a … I don't know … apartment?" he guessed. "In the keep on the western side."

"Sounds fine," Alex said. "Is it okay for you?"

"I've been living out of motel rooms most of my life," he said dryly. "Anything with more than one room is good for me."

* * *

Rufus sighed as he looked at the group of people he'd been saddled with. None over thirty, all clutching their weapons with a combination of nerves and excitement. How the hell was he supposed to turn these idiots into hunters?

"Let's start with the basics," he said, gesturing at them to get closer to the long table. "Your weapons will save your life so you better know them, inside and out. You're responsible for keeping them in the best working order possible." He looked at the mostly blank faces and sighed. "Put them down on the table and break 'em," he continued. "Take them to pieces, we're going to start with cleaning and checking wear and tear."

An hour later, he was thinking of the things he would do to Winchester for giving him this detail as he watched the trainees stare uncomprehendingly at the springs and bolts and barrels.

It wasn't that they were stupid, he told himself again, dredging the depths of his soul for patience as he walked around the table and corrected the multiple mistakes he could see. It was just that they were literally starting from scratch.

Christine Connor had come from Austin. Nineteen years old, she was a pretty girl with long, blonde hair framing a strong, square face and a determination to be better than anyone else. She'd managed to figure out what went where on her assault rifle, but had gone overboard with the gun oil which was dripping from the pieces. He handed her a rag.

"It's for cleaning and lubricating, you don't baste the damned thing," he reminded her sourly, moving along to Lee Doty, who was sitting next to her.

"Lee, more solvent, there's a residue there," he added, pointing to the grunge that he could see in the chamber. "You want it clean enough to eat off."

Lee was also nineteen but from Las Vegas. His mother had made it out with him, a beautiful Polynesian dancer at one of the big shows before the virus had come along and wiped out her life. He smiled inwardly at the memory of Dom's sharp elbow in his ribs when they'd met her and the boy in Tawas.

Adam sat at the end of the table, a frown drawing his brows together as he stared down at the magazine. Rufus pushed a box of ammunition toward him, pulling out a bullet and taking the mag, turning it over and pushing the bullet in. He handed it back to Adam without a word and the half-brother of Dean and Sam looked at him expressionlessly.

"Always make sure you're fully loaded," Rufus said, his mouth lifting on one side humourlessly. "Those missing rounds might have been the ones you needed to live."

He walked away from the table and looked back at them. Danielle Wilder, twenty-one. Wichita. Peregrine White, twenty-three. Boulder. Jack Alden, the oldest by several years at twenty-seven, from Atlanta. Isaac Morris, twenty. Atlanta. Joseph Hinkley, twenty-four, Wichita. Zoe Rivera, twenty, Austin. Billy Hooke, twenty-two, Austin. Most of them had still been in high-school when their world had come crashing down.

There were dozens more, possibly hundreds more, just like them – young, inexperienced in everything. What they needed were more hunters who knew what they were doing, Rufus thought, watching them reassemble their weapons, his gaze checking everything automatically as his thoughts pounded along the familiar path. Needed them for the search and find missions. Needed them for training these kids. Needed them for the defence of the people they'd pulled out of one fire and quite possibly had put into another.

It was no good thinking that leaving these people where they'd been would've been the safer option. The world was not much safer with the devil dead. At least, not in a way that had any meaning for the civilians. They were still that little bit hungry, all the time. They were still working hard under someone else's orders. He rubbed his hand over his face tiredly. They were still learning to defend themselves and everyone else from the things that were out there.

The click and clack of the guns fitting back together again, magazines slapped home hard, rounds loaded and safeties engaged ceased and he looked at the expectant faces looking up at him.

"All right," he said, with a shrug. "Do it again."

* * *

Jerome looked up as Aaron came into the library, Jasper Moore following him. The professor had been tenured at Cornell, his specialty the languages that were no longer in use, and hadn't been for hundreds or thousands of years. In his late sixties, he was a robust and stocky man, fair skin and bright blue eyes almost hidden behind folds and crows feet, short white hair tufted over his head.

"Something?" he asked.

"Possibly," Jasper said, sitting down on the other side of the table. "You have two texts from a collection of works by an Aramaic scholar before Christ's time," he continued, gesturing at the folders of fragile papyrus sheets Aaron place on the table between them. "There should be another three."

"They might be with the other chapters," Jerome acknowledged, looking down at the texts. "What are you looking for?"

"The texts were summarised by the Church, in the early sixteen hundreds – that's not my field," he said quickly, as if such distinctions still mattered. "But they did contain several references to some treasures that were handed to the Qaddiysh a thousand years before Christ."

From the armchair on the other side of the room, the anthropologist, Davis Cutland, and the archaeologist, Katherine Holbeck, turned around to look at the table. Both were also in their late sixties and Jerome wondered why the devil had deemed them important enough to keep alive and in good health. Bobby had asked the same question.

Katherine's nose wrinkled up a little as she looked at Jasper.

"You're talking of the missing Word," she said acerbically. "The legend of the First War in Heaven?"

Jasper smiled mildly at her and Jerome saw the flash of annoyance cross her face. Katherine wasn't anyone he wanted to cross, she had a mind like a steel trap, a range of invective that would blister paint and a complete belief in her own opinions. The square jaw and wide cheekbones made an arresting contrast to her delicately blue eyes and full mouth, but wasn't softened by them or by the short-cut silver hair that framed her face.

"The First War was no legend," Father Emilio interjected from the doorway, walking to the table. "Lucifer rebelled against the Word and was cast down and the war raged on the planes of Heaven and Earth for five hundred years before he was locked in the Cage in the ninth level of Hell."

"Well, that's the certainly the way the Church tells it," Davis said slowly, smiling a little. Of Greek heritage, his face was long and mobile, bushy black brows over hooded, dark brown eyes, a long, hooked nose and wide mouth. "Although, we've never yet been able to uncover the bones of the angels who died here."

Father Emilio smiled at the implication. "Possibly because angels do not consist of flesh and blood and bone, but of energy and spirit?"

"That's a convenient argument," Davis said. He glanced at Katherine. "In any case, there are no records other than heretical texts of the existence of the Qaddiysh, let alone solid proof."

Jerome cleared his throat. "There are, actually," he said, looking at Aaron. "Could you bring us the texts, Aaron?"

"Proof or fairytales?" Katherine asked, looking at him as the slim, dark-haired man walked quickly from the room.

"Oh, proof, my dear," Jerome said distractedly, looking back at Jasper. "The missing texts – what did they contain?"

"The texts referred to knowledge that was given to the Watchers to give to mankind when they were ready," Jasper said, leaning on the table. "The two you have here refer to the creatures that God made, before He made anything else. Leviathan. And Behemoth."

"Yes, I'm familiar with them." Jerome picked up his glasses. "What were the others?"

Jasper smiled. "They were the knowledge of how to defeat the other sources of evil on the planet."

From behind him, Katherine snorted. "The realms of Heaven? And Hell? And the goddess Nintu's offspring?"

Jasper turned around and inclined his head. "Yes, in fact."

"There's no fact involved in that story, Jasper," Katherine said coolly. "Just a load of mixed up mythology from times too far distant to ever be provable."

"You were responsible for the finding of the definitive proof of Mahasrael's tomb, weren't you?" Father Emilio looked at her with a gentle curiosity.

Katherine's gaze cut away uncomfortably. "Yes."

"Yet there was no proof, only the legends in the Apocrypha that led you to it?" The priest pressed, his chin resting on his steepled fingers as he looked at her.

"That was different," Katherine snapped. "There was supporting documentation –"

Jasper laughed softly. "Touché, Father, I've been waiting awhile to see our Katie bristle like that."

"There is also supporting documentation here, Katherine," Jerome said quickly, seeing her eyes narrow at the comment. "We do not rely solely upon the Books of Enoch for our knowledge, Professor."

"The _legend_," Davis emphasised the word. "stated that the Word would be held by the _Irin We-Quadishin_ until mankind was ready. Whether or not the Qaddiysh are legend or not, they were always located in Jordan or Palestine. Of what possible use is that to us here?"

"If the Word was indeed held in the vaults of _Gem Shel Yed'e_, we can get there," Jerome said with certainty. "It will not be an easy journey, but it is possible."

"What's possible?" Bobby looked at him as he came into the library, Ellen behind him.

"Finding the answers to the questions we seek," Jerome said, leaning back in his chair. "The stone of the prophet may be in Jordan."

* * *

The situation room and library were packed. Boze, Renee and Sean had come from Tawas, along with Franklin, Jo, Ty and Tim and his wife, Debbie, from Lake West. Rufus, Chuck, Alex, Vincent, Mel, Maurice, Maggie, Rob and Paul, Father Emilio, Peter, Jerome, Davis, Katherine, Jasper, Aaron, Oliver and Marla were crowded around the computer desks, and filling the stairs as they listened in silence to Jerome and then Jasper talking.

Dean looked from Jerome to Jasper. "So, these stones – tablets – whatever, they're like an instruction manual to closing this world to every kind of evil?"

Sam drew in a breath sharply at his brother's words. "How?"

Jerome shook his head. "We don't know how. Not yet," he said tersely. "And we don't know if they do indeed instruct humanity in that way. We believe they exist. I talked to all the chapters and Dhargey confirmed that one of the tablets is in the order's stronghold in Tibet. "

"Well … Tibet," Bobby said, frowning. "That's nice and handy."

"Dhargey also confirmed that the Qaddiysh hid the tablets around the world, when Lucifer rose," Jerome continued, ignoring the comment. "The records of the order showed that they were visited there in 2009 and a receipt was noted for an item to be placed in the deepest of the caves under the monastery."

Ellen looked around the hunters and initiates in the rooms. Most of them didn't have even the minimal background that was needed to understand the portents and peoples that Jerome was talking about. She glanced at Alex, catching the younger woman's eye and saw that she recognised that as well. They needed another meeting, a smaller one. Then there would be a chance of getting this information into a framework they could use. And disseminate to the others over time.

Dean leaned back against the desk, arms folded. "We've got too much to do here to deal with this right now," he said, looking at Bobby.

"No matter which way you slice it, we're not getting over to Tibet – or the middle East if it comes to that, before next summer," Bobby agreed slowly. "Even if we could get hold of a plane or something that wouldn't take months of travelling –"

Peter glanced at Jerome. "They are right, we must ensure the protection and survival of the people we have here, first," he cut across Bobby. "But there will be hunters in the strongholds of the order who can bring the stone to us."

"Why can't they do whatever's needed over there?" Tim asked, frowning at Jerome.

"The stone cannot be read by a human," Jerome answered gently. "Not even by the Fallen. They've tried, been trying for several hundred years now."

"Then what good is it going to do us?" Jo looked at him coolly. "Do we give it back to Heaven?"

"No," Jasper said, turning around in his chair to look at her. "One person can read such a thing. A prophet."

Chuck felt himself shrinking back into his chair as a dozen pair of eyes turned to him.

* * *

Sam leaned back in the comfortable armchair and yawned, reaching out for the glass beside him.

God had provided mankind with a way to get rid of the evil that permeated their lives, corrupting, destroying. Well, he thought, it wouldn't get rid of the evil that men themselves were capable of, but if the temptations were minimised, perhaps even humanity could move beyond its petty bickering and find the best in themselves, rather than the worst, always sinking helplessly to the lowest common denominator.

He looked around as the door to the office opened quietly, seeing Dean come in.

"How's Chuck holding up?"

Dean shook his head, mouth quirking up at the corner. "Haven't seen him this nervous since I told him he could stop Lilith."

Sam watched his brother drop into the other chair, reaching for the bottle and pouring himself a glass of the order's extremely good whiskey.

"You think it's all real?" he asked quietly. "The way to close Hell, to change everything?"

Sighing, Dean tipped his head back and closed his eyes. "Can't think of a reason for a practical joke on this scale, Sam."

"And it's what Death told you about, isn't it?" Sam pressed. "Closing the gates of Hell and Heaven?"

"Yeah, it's what he told me."

"You don't seem as enthusiastic as I thought you'd be," Sam said, a disbelieving edge along the words.

"I was kind of hoping for a bit of a break between the monumental efforts to save the fucking world," Dean retorted, rolling his head to one side and opening his eyes to look at his brother. "It's been five weeks since Atlanta and I haven't stopped."

"Teach you for stepping up when the world needs saving, Dean."

"Yeah, well, I must be a helluva slow learner, 'cause it doesn't seem to have took."

He swallowed a mouthful of whiskey and let out a long exhale. "How're you doing, anyway?"

Sam looked away. "I'm okay."

Dean's snort dragged his gaze back.

"Well, you didn't expect it to be a five-minute fix, did you?" he said.

"No," Dean admitted unwillingly. "Just want to know if you can deal, that's all."

"I think so," Sam said. "I mean, it was a mess, when I got here. And it's still a mess. But … I think I can see the edges now."

His brother didn't respond, his head bowed as he looked down into the glass he held.

"I have to find a way to atone, somehow, Dean," Sam said slowly. "A way to pay for what happened, to make amends – I don't know. I can't pretend this wasn't on me, and I don't want to, but it's so fucking big that I'm not sure …"

Dean looked at him as he trailed off. "Yeah, I know."

Sam smiled sourly at him. "You don't, you know. What you did, Dean … there isn't a possible comparison. And that's okay –" he said, holding up a hand to forestall his brother's protest. "It's not going to be quick, that's all I'm trying to say."

"Well, you got time," Dean said, looking around the comfortable office. "As much as you need."

"Not if we're going to do this."

Dean smiled. "But _we're_ not. I am. You're off active until you've got this figured out."

Sam shook his head. "No."

"Sam, we haven't found anything yet, not really. It'll be months before we do and that's the most optimistic timescale I can figure. And I've got people I have to keep safe here, got responsibilities I have to meet here before anything else happens anyway," Dean argued. "Take your time. I want you there, man, but not half-assed. I want you there right on top of it, okay?"

Sam looked at him. "You're not gonna just brush it off?"

"No," Dean scowled at him. "But I want to be clear. This isn't going to be a sprint, it's gonna be a marathon. And it's gonna have to fit into everything else. So, get your shit figured out. There's time."

"Yeah," Sam nodded. "Yeah, okay."

* * *

_**Hell**_

The ingredients in the bowl burned with a rush, lighting up the sides of the metal container and the face of the demon that watched it. Around the painstakingly drawn circles, the eyes of the creatures embedded in the rock at the junction points gleamed and glistened in the brilliant saffron light, knowing their lives were over, fearing death anyway, as the circles began to seep a deep carnelian light of their own, pulsing then coruscating along their boundaries.

Deep within the rock that formed every level, every tunnel and crevice and hole in the accursed plane, a vibration started, grinding and groaning as it increased. In the lower levels the demons looked around uneasily and fled before the noise, shrieking in fear. The three stood silently. The moment of transformation came without warning and they had no time to escape or to rage against the power that bound them, except in the echoing wastelands of their minds, filled with hate and malice and venom.

In the spell circle, the demon smiled, eyes flashing red corner to corner. It'd taken almost three centuries to find the binding spell and more than a century to search out every vital component and ingredient. But it was done. The nine had been decimated to three and the three were bound. And Hell was up for grabs.

* * *

**A/N:** _I hope you've enjoyed this story, and if you did, I hope you'll drop me a line to let me know. The Apocalypse series continues with the next volume_, _**In the Fires of Hell**_.


End file.
